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It's never been easier to create and publish art than it is now, and if you believe the companies building tech around AI, the production process is going to get even more efficient. That's especially the case with video production, with companies of all sizes using large language models to build tools that let you whip up decent-quality videos and animation with a few prompts and actions.
Popular tools in this space include Google's Veo 2, OpenAI's Sora, Runway, Luma AI, and Shanghai-based Hailuo. Now, a South Korean startup called Cinamon is ramping up efforts to claim a part of this burgeoning market — it recently raised an $8.5 million to continue building its animated video generation platform "CINEV," slated to be launched in beta in the first half of 2025. Altos Ventures, an existing backer, as well as Saehan Venture Capital invested in this round.
Cinamon's pitch is that its platform provides a video generator that can let you build 3D environments, direct scenes and actions, place characters, edit camera angles, and more — all with text prompts and sliders.
According to its CEO Doosun Hong, the company's approach fundamentally differs from existing AI video generators, which create videos by generating pixels using text, images, and videos as reference materials. In contrast, CINEV combines a 3D asset library, AI motion generation, and a filmmaking-focused large language model to first construct 3D scenes complete with characters and elements, and then lets you edit them using its suite of video production and editing tools.
"Our approach enables easier direction and editing without consistency/physics issues, making it particularly suitable for longer-form content like films and dramas," Hong said. "We envision CINEV to be complementary to existing AI video tools, potentially enabling new workflows where CINEV's output could serve as high-quality reference material for other AI video platforms."
Cinamon started life in 2019 as Cinamon Games, a subsidiary of content production firm Vonvon. Cinamon initially set up a JV with NAVER WEBTOON, a Korean digital storytelling platform, to create Maybe, an interactive storytelling app. Facing growing data privacy concerns, Vonvon merged with Cinamon Games later in 2019 to focus solely on storytelling in the social content space.
While its competitors like Crazy Maple Studio started offering animated interactive story apps, fiction apps, storytelling apps, and short-form videos, Cinamon instead chose to focus on creating 3D animation tools that could speed up and scale animation production for content creators and studios. Even though it cost more investment than tools for 2D content, they saw greater scalability potential.