Brahma Rewrites The Studio Playbook

By Pickle October 10, 2026

An Indian studio ecosystem is building beyond movies. Brahma AI wants its production expertise powering businesses across the wider world

What happens when a company that helps Hollywood manufacture reality starts selling that capability beyond cinema? Brahma AI is betting that the next customer for a convincing digital human could be a hospital, a sports league or a retailer.

The ambition changes the familiar Indian studio story. Instead of supplying another spectacular sequence, the business wants to supply the technology through which other organisations create, manage and distribute audiovisual content.

On September 23, 2026, Prime Focus announced a $150 million funding round for Brahma, led by Multiples, at a $2 billion valuation, subject to customary approvals. The money is earmarked for research, a Bay Area presence and global expansion.

The studio becomes a platform

Brahma was established in June 2024, integrating Prime Focus Technologies and Metaphysic in November 2025. Founder and CEO Prabhu Narasimhan leads the business, with cofounder and CTO Jo Plaete directing technology and research.

Prime Focus founder Namit Malhotra presents DNEG and Brahma as complementary growth engines: one delivering visual effects and animation, the other enterprise technology. Brahma has its own board and management; Prime Focus expects approximately 66% economic ownership through DNEG after the financing and associated dilution.

Its platform connects two functions. Core ingests, searches and organises content; Studio creates it, including ATMAN digital humans and VAANI multilingual voice performances. PFT’s CLEAR and CLEAR AI combine with Metaphysic’s technology across content management, creation, distribution and security.

The resulting proposition is not another box that produces images from prompts. It is a system designed to make those images, voices and identities usable inside a business.

Plaete captures the shift neatly: “Identity used to be something you rendered. Now it’s something you license.” A digital double can become a reusable asset rather than an effect commissioned for one film.

He cites work on Here, Furiosa and F1; Brahma also received a 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy for AI-based face replacement and performance-preserving transformation. The enterprise pitch grows out of production experience.

Hollywood is the starting point

Brahma identifies Warner Bros, the NBA and Mayo Clinic as anchor customers. Its proposed applications extend to physicians explaining procedures in different languages, athletes interacting with fans and experts helping retail customers.

A March 2026 partnership with Google Cloud connects its digital humans to cloud infrastructure and models including Veo and Gemini. A June agreement with Hakuhodo Technologies targets Japan and Asia-Pacific.

Narasimhan says Brahma is becoming model-agnostic, with interactive digital humans approaching launch. The wager is that lasting value lies in connecting models, content libraries, permissions and delivery, not relying on one generator.

Investors and partners see that opening. Multiples founder Renuka Ramnath says “every enterprise is becoming a content enterprise”, while Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian highlights fidelity, security and ethical governance.

These endorsements carry commercial interests, however. In the wider debate, I2A2 chief Renard Jenkins has warned that consolidation can unsettle production workflows when acquired tools disappear or change direction.

India’s next production advantage

India’s opportunity is practical, not merely patriotic. FICCI-EY’s 2026 report found 60% of surveyed media executives reporting AI adoption in content creation and processing respectively, driven partly by repetitive work and multilingual requirements.

At Brahma customer STAGE, cofounder Shashank Vaishnav welcomed better metadata, greater efficiency and faster content retrieval. These are everyday production problems, suggesting an adoption advantage without proving India leads every AI frontier.

The harder test is trust. Brahma promises consent-driven likenesses, ownership safeguards and provenance through Mind², its philosophy of human direction and machine execution.

Promises, though, need to survive real contracts and real productions. Artists will want to know who authorises reuse, how performances are protected and whether efficiency creates creative possibilities or simply reduces their bargaining power.

For studios, that points towards a different identity: creative business, software supplier and guardian of licensed performances. For India, the prize is not simply using AI sooner. It is building systems the world chooses to use.