# Funding-to-product outcomes: 2025 AI video and creative-tool cohort

Current cohort version: 1.0. Built September 23, 2026. **Covered count: 11 company–round events across 11 companies. This is a sourced pilot, not an exhaustive census.** The total number of qualifying companies in the market is unknown.

## Scope and inclusion rules

The event must have been publicly announced from January 1 through December 31, 2025 inclusive. The company must have offered an AI product directly used to create, generate, edit, localize, or orchestrate video, audio, images, visual assets, or narrative/creator content. Tool providers and creator-focused media-generation platforms qualify; a company need not focus on video alone.

Require a distinct company and financing round with the stage and/or round amount supported by a company statement, named participating/lead investor statement, issuer-provided press release, or equivalent primary source. Record the announcement date rather than assuming it is the close date. Store round amount separately from cumulative funding, debt, a valuation, a tender offer or a compute/infrastructure commitment. Preserve amounts as published; `over $300 million` remains a lower-bound phrase, not `$308 million`.

Exclude corporate AI investment programs without an identified company financing round; accelerator participation without a tied equity round; acquisitions, IPOs and employee liquidity transactions; generic AI infrastructure/API companies without a direct creative product; and secondary-only reports until a primary source is found. Keep exclusions separate from the cohort. Do not duplicate one round reported by several outlets.

## Discovery and selection coverage

This first version was seeded from Kingy's existing company/launch records and targeted searches of issuer, company newsroom and named-investor announcements for 2025 financing of AI video, visual-generation, audio-creation and creative-workflow companies. We opened the linked primary sources and retained only events whose identity/date and financing claim were supportable. The source search was targeted, not a registry-by-registry census; there is no complete candidate-universe denominator. Therefore the coverage statement is **11 included events among the primary-source records reviewed; market-wide completeness unknown**. Do not call 11 the total number of deals in 2025 or imply representative sampling.

The four events from June–August 2026 drafted under the earlier scope are moved to `fixtures/out-of-scope-2026/` and are excluded from this cohort and all denominators. Other boundary examples: Captions' surfaced Series C announcement is dated 2024; Google's AI Futures Fund is a program and names no specific qualifying round in the announcement; Vermillio's product is AI rights monitoring/licensing rather than a direct creative-production tool. These are not negative product outcomes.

## Stable identifiers and follow-up

`company_id` identifies the company; `event_id` identifies this dated funding event. Future cohort additions must increment the cohort version and get their own selection rationale; do not silently rewrite the v1 membership. Each future product/status observation should be a dated event linked to `company_id`, with an exact source URL, source excerpt, observation time and evidence class.

Track product launch and external availability; meaningful capability/platform/plan and price changes; independently supported customer or usage milestones; verified acquisition; and confirmed shutdown. Separate company-reported claims from independently corroborated observations. A vanished web page is not proof of shutdown, acquisition is not failure, valuation is not operating performance, and announcements are not causal evidence that funding produced an outcome.

All current product-outcome statuses in the CSV are `unknown`: this pass verifies the funding cohort and does not complete each company's longitudinal product-history search. The precomputed 90/180/365-day review dates schedule evidence collection from each announcement date; they are not observed outcomes. Monthly reporting must name the as-of date, denominator with known observations, unknown count and source limitations. Do not calculate survival or causal effects from missing records.

## Primary-source notes

- Runway: the lead investor republishes the company's Series D announcement and reports **over $300M**; retain that wording.
- Synthesia and ElevenLabs: official company announcements give round date/amount and published valuation; valuation basis is unspecified in the respective source language unless explicitly stated.
- Black Forest Labs: official company announcement gives $300M Series B and $3.25B post-money valuation.
- Luma: official company announcement gives $900M Series C and separately describes the Project Halo compute partnership; the partnership is not added to round size.
- Hedra: issuer-provided release gives $32M Series A; a16z's own investment post corroborates the category/round investment.
- FLORA and Creatify: official company blog announcements.
- Higgsfield: issuer is identified as Higgsfield Inc. in its September 9, 2025 press release.
- Aive: founder public announcement corroborates the €12M Series A; issuer-related release is distributed by Agence Raoul.
- Dashverse: named lead investor Z47 documents the $13M Series A and identifies Frameo.AI as its generative-video product.

See `verification.json` for source URLs, source classes, checked claims and validation output.