Why We Invested in Flick: The AI-Native Filmmaking Platform
Real cinema, not slop. Mike Montano on why Flick's founders — an award-winning filmmaker and a founding Instagram Stories engineer — are the rare team to build Flick, True's latest investment.
Flick announced a $6M seed round to build an AI-native filmmaking platform for directors. We're proud to be investing alongside GV, Y Combinator, Lightspeed, Pioneer Fund, Formosa Capital, Olive Tree, N1, and a deep bench of angels.
Between my years at Twitter and a lifelong love of books, film, and art, storytelling has always been the thread that pulls me in. So when we met Ray Wang and Zoey Zhang through Y Combinator, I was already leaning in. In a year where every other deck has been some flavor of AI video, two things stood out almost immediately.
The first was the founders. Zoey is a real, award-winning filmmaker — a decade in the craft before she ever touched AI, with 30+ festival nods for her AI work in under a year. Ray was a founding engineer on Instagram Stories, the team that took it from zero to 400M users. Most teams in this space have one side of that combination — an engineer reaching for film, or a filmmaker reaching for tools. Ray and Zoey have both, and you can feel it in everything they ship.
The second was the work itself. Most of what we see in AI video generation today is volume — a prompt in, a clip out — fine for ads or scrolling feeds but not really film. The work being made on Flick is different. The first cohort of the Flick Residency (10+ emerging filmmakers led by Zoey) has work showing at Cinequest, MIT, and the Omni AI Film Festival. Watch the Flick Residency Films here. The quality is the headline. This is real cinema, not slop.
That quality isn't an accident. Flick isn't another video generator — it's a power tool for storytellers, built so directors can convey real emotion and depth, with every part of the storytelling workflow in one workspace. The canvas is non-linear: filmmakers compose with scripts, characters, scenes, and shots as connected nodes. Cinematic controls for visual consistency, camera language, shot angles, and emotional arc are where the product spends its complexity. The model layer is abstracted away so directors can direct. Think Figma + Cursor, for filmmaking.
Ray and Zoey aren't building tools to replace filmmakers. They're building tools so the next generation of filmmakers can focus on what's always mattered: storytelling, character, and intent. We can't wait to see what their community makes next.