Mumbai-Rooted Brahma AI Hits $2 Billion Valuation on $150 Million Round

Brahma AI, an enterprise artificial-intelligence company headquartered across Los Angeles, London and Mumbai, has raised $150 million in a preferred-share funding round that values the company at $2 billion post-money — one of the largest single valuations achieved by an India-linked AI company to date. The round was led by Mumbai-based private equity firm Multiples Alternate Asset Management, with participation from prior backers United Al Saqer Group and investor Thor Björgólfsson. Brahma says it has received expressions of interest for a further $100 million on top of the round, and Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. acted as placement agent.

Built from the wreckage-turned-raw-material of three companies

Brahma AI's origin story is unusual even by AI-startup standards: rather than being built from scratch, the company was assembled by combining technology stacks developed across three separate organisations — visual-effects giant DNEG, AI-video company Metaphysic, and Prime Focus Technologies. Founder and CEO Prabhu Narasimhan is credited with the vision of pulling those disparate capabilities into a single, independent AI company, with co-founder and CTO Jo Plaete leading technology and R&D.

The DNEG connection is more than incidental. Namit Malhotra, DNEG's founder and CEO — an Indian entrepreneur who built DNEG into one of the world's largest visual-effects studios, with major India operations spanning Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru, and whose work has touched films including Dune and Oppenheimer — has personally joined Brahma AI's cap table as an investor in this round. Malhotra described what Narasimhan's team built from the combined DNEG, Metaphysic and Prime Focus foundations as "remarkable," a notable endorsement from someone whose own company effectively seeded the technology.

What Brahma AI actually sells

Brahma AI describes its product as an "AI-native operating system" for enterprise audiovisual content, split into two main components. Brahma AI Core is a content-intelligence and management layer that organises and indexes a company's existing audiovisual assets. Brahma AI Studio is the generative side of the platform, comprising tools for creating digital humans (branded ATMAN), synthetic voice (branded VAANI), visual AI content and multilingual localisation, aimed at letting large enterprises produce video, audio, image and avatar content at a scale that would be prohibitively expensive using traditional production pipelines.

The company's customer list is aimed squarely at large, brand-sensitive enterprises rather than prosumers: its anchor customers include Warner Bros, the NBA and the Mayo Clinic, spanning entertainment, sports and healthcare — three sectors where high-quality video and audio content is both mission-critical and expensive to produce at scale. Strategic distribution partners include Google, Japanese advertising giant Hakuhodo, and DNEG itself, giving Brahma built-in distribution channels into media production and advertising workflows that would otherwise take years to build independently.

The company's technology has already picked up outside validation: Brahma AI received a 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for its visual AI work, a rare form of industry recognition for a company that is simultaneously an enterprise software vendor and, in effect, a media-technology company.

Where the money goes

Narasimhan said the new capital would accelerate research and development and fund global go-to-market expansion, with a specific emphasis on establishing a significant Silicon Valley presence — notable for a company that already has a Los Angeles base, suggesting Brahma sees value in being physically embedded in the Bay Area's AI research ecosystem specifically, distinct from its existing entertainment-industry foothold in LA. Narasimhan pointed to interactive digital humans as the next major product push, describing the company as close to launching that capability.

Multiples founder, managing director and CEO Renuka Ramnath framed the investment in terms of the broader content-supply-chain opportunity, saying Brahma AI is "reimagining the content supply chain in the age of AI" in a way that reinforces the fund's conviction in the company's ability to capture what she described as a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity. That framing positions Brahma not as a narrow AI-video tool but as infrastructure for how large enterprises produce and manage content altogether — a considerably larger addressable market than generative-video tools aimed at individual creators or marketing teams.

Why enterprise media AI is drawing premium valuations

Brahma AI's $2 billion valuation lands in a specific and increasingly well-capitalised sub-category of the generative AI market: tools built for large enterprises that need vast volumes of brand-safe, legally cleared audiovisual content rather than open-ended consumer creativity tools. That distinction matters commercially. Consumer-facing AI video generators have struggled to build durable business models given the difficulty of charging sustainably for a feature that is being commoditised across multiple competing products. Enterprise buyers like Warner Bros or the Mayo Clinic, by contrast, care less about novelty and more about auditability, rights management and integration with existing production and compliance workflows — precisely the layer Brahma AI Core is built to handle before any generative tools in Brahma AI Studio are even invoked.

That positioning also explains why DNEG's underlying technology stack was valuable raw material for Brahma AI in the first place. Visual-effects studios like DNEG have spent decades building tooling for exactly the kind of large-scale, rights-sensitive, quality-controlled content production that generic AI-video startups are only now trying to approximate from scratch. By starting from DNEG's, Metaphysic's and Prime Focus's existing production-grade infrastructure rather than building generative tooling in isolation, Brahma AI arrived at enterprise credibility — and enterprise customers — faster than a startup without that lineage plausibly could have.

An Indian AI story with a global structure

Brahma AI's three-city headquarters structure — Los Angeles, London and Mumbai — makes it an unusual case study in what counts as an "Indian" AI company in 2026. Its lead investor is an Indian private equity firm, its most prominent new backer is one of India's best-known media entrepreneurs, and Mumbai is one of its three formal headquarters cities, reflecting both DNEG's deep India production and technology base and the reality that Indian capital and Indian technical talent are now backing globally headquartered AI companies rather than only India-domiciled startups serving primarily domestic customers. For a market that has spent the past two years asking whether India can produce AI companies capable of competing globally rather than simply servicing global AI companies from an outsourcing base, Brahma AI's $2 billion valuation — built on India-adjacent capital, India-connected leadership and a technology base partly assembled in India — is being read by investors as evidence that the answer is trending toward yes, even where the resulting company's headquarters span three continents rather than sitting in Bengaluru or Mumbai alone.

Sources

• BRAHMA AI RAISES $150 MILLION ROUND LED BY MULTIPLES
• Indian AI firm backed by Dune and Odyssey visual effects studio valued at $2 billion in fundraise
• Brahma AI raises $150 million at $2 billion valuation
• Brahma AI Raises $150 Mn in Preferred Share Funding Led by Multiples