AI startup Voia is coming out of stealth mode and introducing its developing visual effects pipeline.
“We have built this for artists, by artists,” says CEO Avner Braverman. “We’re basically taking VFX and we’re putting in a lot of AI and automation, building it into a platform that makes it more creative, giving a lot of freedom and a lot of creativity for the higher-end storytellers and higher-end filmmakers, and makes it more accessible for people that may not have Hollywood-style budgets.”
With that goal and his experience in high-performance infrastructure tech, he founded the Sunnyvalle, Calif.-headquartered company in 2022 alongside fellow tech vets Haim Helman and Noam Malali. The trio assembled a team with Hollywood tech vets including Scot Barbour, an Apple (Final Cut Pro) alum and former vice president of production technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment, who is vice president of creative; and Mitch Singer, a former chief strategy officer at Sony Pictures Entertainment, who is a company advisor. To date, Voia has raise around $10 million, including investment from its founders and strategic investors Keshet International and WPP.
Barbour relates that Voia’s goal is to democratize VFX work, particularly that involving virtual production, with a pipeline that provides “a lot of freedom and a lot of creativity for the higher-end storytellers and higher-end filmmakers, and makes it more accessible for people that may not have Hollywood style budgets.”
Voia’s AI models support a pipeline developed to accommodate a basic “point and shoot” pipeline that could be used, for instance, to create content for TikTok. And there’s a sort of “pro pipeline” that allows artists to use professional tools – gaming engines such as Unreal, compositing tools such as Nuke, editing systems and other VFX software. Barbour notes that those cases, “we’re delivering discrete layers – here’s your camera tracking layer, here’s your foreground, there’s your background, There’s your depth map.”
The toolset’s development started for the iPhone, but next month a new version is slated for release that supports use of professional cameras including those from ARRI and Red.
The tech is already in the hands of a select group of early customers, including Green Productions, Pace Pictures and BBDO. Says Barbour, “the range goes from kind of mid-sized production companies and ad agencies all the way up to A-list filmmakers in Hollywood.”
