Two veterans of self-driving car companies are trying to make it big in Hollywood—not as actors, but as builders of the AI software on which the blockbuster movies of the future will be created.
They’ve launched a San Francisco-based startup called Odyssey that is competing with the likes of OpenAI, Runway, Kuaishou, and Metaphysic to provide tools for professional filmmakers and animators to create professional quality films using generative AI.
Today, Odyssey emerged from almost a year of operating in “stealth mode,” with $9 million in seed funding from GV (Google Ventures, the venture arm of Alphabet), with participation by DCVC, Air Street Capital, and more than a dozen individual early stage investors and angel investors.
The company’s AI software is in some ways similar to OpenAI’s Sora or Runway’s Gen 3, which turn a text description of a scene or sequence of shots into a short, high-quality, cinematic video.
Sora, which has only been released to a few initial test users so far but which OpenAI revealed in a splashy demo in February, has put Hollywood on edge. Film producer After seeing the Sora demo, Tyler Perry said he was putting plans for an $800 million film studio expansion in Atlanta on "indefinite hold" because Sora made him doubt whether traditional studios would have a place in the future.
