Flam targets Nigerian market as AI firm raises $40m

Artificial intelligence (AI) interactive content company Flam is targeting the Nigerian market through a partnership with SmartSense Technologies, following its $40 million Series B funding round led by QED Investors.

The funding, which also attracted Claypond Capital, Martin Chavez, Olivier Pomel, Venky Harinarayan and Shah Rukh Khan, will be used to support research and development of Flam’s AI models, expand its product suite and scale enterprise sales globally.

Existing investors RTP Global and Dovetail also participated in the round. SmartSense Technologies is Flam’s exclusive partner in Nigeria and will be responsible for localising and deploying the company’s interactive AI technology for businesses, agencies and enterprises in the country.

“Nigeria is an exceptionally mobile-first market, with brands and consumers that adopt new forms of digital engagement very quickly,” said Dr Seyi, chief executive of SmartSense Technologies.

“Flam gives brands the ability to move beyond passive content and create experiences people can interact with, respond to and participate in. Our role at SmartSense is to bring that capability into the Nigerian market, localise it for real business use cases, and help brands, agencies and enterprises deploy it at scale.”

Flam said it has signed more than 100 enterprise customers in six quarters, including Google, Emirates and KFC, with its technology being used for marketing, product visualisation, learning and development, entertainment, fan engagement, customer support and sales.

“Flam is built on a simple observation. Content has moved in waves, from text to images to video, and every wave flowed one way, creator to viewer. We think interactive is the next default for the internet,” said Shourya Agarwal, founder of Flam.

“The demand was always there. The technology wasn’t. We have made interactivity effortless to build and deploy at enterprise scale.”

The company, founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, has teams in India and Japan and holds more than 15 patents and five AI models. Its product suite includes interactive videos, 3D content and visual agents designed to allow users to interact with digital content rather than simply consume it.

Flam’s technology includes Flicks, which are interactive videos that can change people, products or scenes during playback; Forge, an editing model that modifies specified elements in image references; and Airboards, which provide 3D content with touch, voice and haptic interactions. The company also operates Fable, an image-to-video model, and Visual Agents, which are designed to conduct conversations and take actions through a video-call-style interface.

QED Investors co-founder and managing partner, Nigel Morris, said the company was focused on an area of the content ecosystem that remained relatively underdeveloped.

“Almost every frontier AI content company we see is optimising what already exists. Flam pointed at something else: how much of the content ecosystem is still untouched. That gap is bigger than most people think, and Flam is the first team we’ve seen with the infrastructure to go after it.”

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