Brahma AI, the generative media company owned by Prime Focus through its visual effects studio DNEG, has raised $150 million from Indian private equity firm Multiples Alternate Asset Management at a $2 billion valuation. Prime Focus keeps a 66% stake via DNEG, the studio behind the Dune films and The Odyssey, and says a further $100 million of investor interest could see the round enlarged to take in some or all of it. Tekedia calls it one of India's most closely watched bets on generative AI for audiovisual work, because it prices a company sitting between enterprise software and film production, two fields both changing fast.
Rather than building its own foundation model, Brahma pitches itself as a platform for companies to create, manage and transform video and audio, drawing on tools first developed for film and television effects. It works across media, sports, healthcare and advertising, and names Warner Bros., the NBA and the Mayo Clinic as anchor customers. Its argument is that video and audio are becoming valuable business data as companies produce more of it, which puts Brahma closer to a workflow and infrastructure supplier than a consumer app that makes synthetic clips.
Founder and chief executive Prabhu Narasimhan says the aim is to become the AI-native system through which the largest enterprises handle their audiovisual assets. He also says Brahma is close to launching interactive digital humans that reproduce a real person's likeness and persona. Possible uses range from entertainment and advertising to customer service, training and healthcare. Tekedia notes that such replicas raise the platform's commercial value but put identity rights, consent and control over who may authorise and deploy a person's likeness at the centre of the business.
The company's stack is meant to work with any underlying model, so customers are not tied to one provider as the model market shifts. Tekedia sees that as a selling point for enterprises, but says Brahma will then need its own layer of tools and workflow that clients value enough to pay for separately. The model market is moving quickly, with providers competing on price and specialist performance, and a platform sitting above them could in theory keep its value as individual models are replaced.
Much of the valuation rests on Brahma's lineage. It bought Metaphysic, the UK real-time synthetic media firm known for its generative face work, early last year, and is combining that technology with DNEG's effects expertise and Prime Focus's wider media business. Metaphysic had been on Time's list of the 100 most influential companies in 2023. Multiples founder Renuka Ramnath pointed to that mix of Hollywood-grade technology and enterprise work as the reason for the bet, while Tekedia frames the deal as investors paying for the idea that tools built for blockbusters can become a scalable enterprise platform.
Tekedia also reads the deal as part of India's shift from technology services toward building its own AI products. The harder task, it argues, is turning tools built for expensive film productions into repeatable products for other industries, and the $2 billion price raises the bar for doing so. For Prime Focus the deal is a way to cash in on technology from its effects business while keeping control; for Multiples it is exposure to AI moving beyond foundation models into specialist applications. The extra investor demand shows appetite, Tekedia says, but the real test is recurring revenue, since the valuation assumes AI-made and AI-managed media becomes a major software category.
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