Moonvalley Raises $84 Million, Venice Immersive Selections, Grok’s Naughty Avatars

Moonvalley Raises $84 million in Series B funding, led by General Catalyst CAA, Comcast Ventures, CoreWeave, Khosla Ventures, and YCombinator. This brings the total raised by the Toronto startup to to $154 million. The company’s flagship tool, Marey, is now publicly available via subscription (~$14.99/mo), offering filmmakers and brands advanced AI-driven visual effects and background footage. Unlike rivals accused of copyright infringement, Moonvalley has trained Marey exclusively on licensed and original content, positioning itself as an ethical, IP-compliant alternative. Founded by former DeepMind researchers, Moonvalley recently acquired Asteria, a new studio led by entrepreneur and producer Bryn Mooser, to bridge the gap between Generative AI video model development and real-world entertainment media production workflows. ws.

The Venice Film Festival has revealed its 2025 Venice Immersive lineup, featuring 69 groundbreaking XR projects from 27 countries. This year’s selection includes 30 competitive works, among them world and international premieres, spanning VR, mixed reality, and immersive installations . The remaining 39 pieces are non-competitive showcases, including “Best of Experiences,” “Best of Worlds” from VRChat creators, and five titles from the Biennale College Cinema – Immersive lab. An international jury headed by Eliza McNitt will award top honors. The immersive works will be staged on Venice’s Lazzaretto Vecchio island from August 26 to September 6.

Move Over Character.ai, Grok’s new Avatars DO go there. xAI’s Grok iOS app has launched “AI Companions”, featuring 3D animated avatars. Ani, is an anime-style female voice companion in a provocative outfit, and Rudy, a red panda with mood-based personalities including a crude “Bad Rudy” mode. These companions interact via voice chat, change backgrounds, and unlock new behaviors as users build rapport. Reaching higher “relationship” levels with Ani reveals an NSFW mode which reportedly comes with lingerie and explicit talk. I’m sure it will get better, and people love Character.ai, so I think they’re on to something here. I found the latency intolerable after a few minutes.

Pico Slimming Down For It’s Next Headset, XR codenamed “Swan.” It offloads processing to a separate “puck” which makes it much smaller, lighter and sleeker than the Quest. Tik Tok parent Bytedance purchased Pico VR when they were feeling heady about taking on Meta head-to-head. If you’re beating them at social media, they reasoned, they can be pressured in VR, too. Still, Bytedance is a huge platform for selling things larger in China, even, than Tik Tok is in the US. A few hours ago Hamish Hector published a Tech Radar opinion piece Pico’s next XR headset could be lighter and smaller than ever, but I hope it just skips to AR glasses instead.

A Fake Film About The Real World Is The First AI-generated Film Released in Theaters. Producers say “Post Truth” is the world’s first feature-length AI-generated documentary to secure a theatrical release. The film is being released in Turkey’s Başka Sinema on 58 screens in more than twenty cities this summer. Created by AI artist Alkan Avcıoğlu and co-written and co-produced with Vikki Bardot, the film uses over 55 hours of AI-generated content, including visuals, sound, music, and narration, to examine how society has arrived at a moment where truth and reality no longer matter.

This column is also a podcast hosted by its author, Charlie Fink, Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive, founding Red Camera executive, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Christopher Summerfield, author of These Strange Minds. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.