A Hollywood star built an AI startup—and sold it for $587 million.
Netflix’s latest filings revealed a $587 million all-cash acquisition of a 16-person AI startup.
Its founder isn’t another Silicon Valley AI wunderkind. It’s Ben Affleck—yes, Batman Ben Affleck.
He quietly founded the company, InterPositive, in 2022.
Affleck later described the moment it began: he walked into OpenAI, saw early text-to-image technology, and immediately called Matt Damon:
“Brother, we need to make as many movies as possible in the next few years. We’re doomed.”
But after the initial panic, he noticed something important.
The researchers were brilliant at building models—but they knew almost nothing about filmmaking: how to light a scene, frame a shot, move a camera, or cut a sequence.
So he turned that gap into a business.
InterPositive spent eight months filming its own proprietary footage on soundstages, training models only on clean, rights-cleared data. The goal wasn’t to generate entire movies from a prompt—it was to help studios with post-production.
In March, Netflix announced it was acquiring InterPositive.
In July, the price came out: $587 million in cash.
For a company with just 16 people, that’s roughly $37 million per employee.
Netflix’s latest filings revealed a $587 million all-cash acquisition of a 16-person AI startup.
Its founder isn’t another Silicon Valley AI wunderkind. It’s Ben Affleck—yes, Batman Ben Affleck.
He quietly founded the company, InterPositive, in 2022.
Affleck later described the moment it began: he walked into OpenAI, saw early text-to-image technology, and immediately called Matt Damon:
“Brother, we need to make as many movies as possible in the next few years. We’re doomed.”
But after the initial panic, he noticed something important.
The researchers were brilliant at building models—but they knew almost nothing about filmmaking: how to light a scene, frame a shot, move a camera, or cut a sequence.
So he turned that gap into a business.
InterPositive spent eight months filming its own proprietary footage on soundstages, training models only on clean, rights-cleared data. The goal wasn’t to generate entire movies from a prompt—it was to help studios with post-production.
In March, Netflix announced it was acquiring InterPositive.
In July, the price came out: $587 million in cash.
For a company with just 16 people, that’s roughly $37 million per employee.