Look AI Ventures Joins ValkaAI’s €13M Pre-Seed Round, Backing Real-Time AI Personas for Live Entertainment

Look AI Ventures has joined ValkaAI‘s pre-seed round alongside ff Venture Capital, bringing the backing to €13 million. ValkaAI, a Czech deep-tech company, develops real-time generative AI that lets digital personas react to live events, and has already launched its first product, ValkaAI Commentator.

The new funding will accelerate ValkaAI’s research into real-time video and audio generation, support hiring senior AI researchers, and help bring its technology to commercial partners.

Real-time AI personas for live entertainment

Live entertainment runs on reactions: the voice that rises when the game turns, the expression that tells you something just happened. ValkaAI builds AI models that let digital personas do exactly that, understanding live events and responding through speech, facial expressions, and movement. The technology is designed for sports, esports, gaming, and media, where a live experience can be adapted to different audiences, languages, and platforms.

ValkaAI Commentator, launched this year, generates live sports and esports commentary directly from event data.

• Its own technology. Instead of building on top of existing generative AI models, ValkaAI develops its own across three research areas: video generation, audio generation, and event understanding.
• Built for real time. ValkaAI solves the challenge to make all three work together live, so its personas react naturally and in sync without getting in the way of the experience.

“For eighty years, sports broadcasting has been a monologue: one commentator, one script, millions of viewers. ValkaAI is turning it into a conversation. Its digital personas react to the game live and speak directly to each viewer. Today, anyone can make a flashy AI clip in a couple of clicks. Few can build an entire business on AI video, and that’s what we’re backing,” said Angelo Burgarello, Partner at Look AI Ventures.

The team behind ValkaAI

ValkaAI is led by CEO Vlastimil Venclík, who built Oddin.gg, a two-time winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Central Europe ranking. He co-founded ValkaAI in 2025 with COO Miloš Lokajíček. Since February, the team has grown to approximately 50 people across San Francisco, Prague, and Dubai, including researchers from Meta and DeepMind.

“Live entertainment is built around reactions, personalities, and emotion. Today, delivering that experience to every audience is difficult to scale. We’re developing AI that can change that, but it requires solving research challenges that existing models weren’t designed for. Look AI Ventures understands both the technical ambition and the commercial opportunity behind what we’re building,” said Vlastimil Venclík, CEO and co-founder of ValkaAI.

Inside the €13M pre-seed round: ValkaAI’s investors

The new investment by ff Venture Capital and Look AI Ventures extends the pre-seed round ValkaAI announced in February 2026, led by Rockaway Ventures, with participation from J&T Ventures, Tensor Ventures, BD Partners, Fond Naše Česko, and Petr Zámečník.

“When you meet exceptional founders embarking on such an ambitious journey, backing them is an easy decision. Live commentary is the first application of a much broader vision. Delivering on that vision requires deep technical expertise, conviction and the ability to turn research into products people want to use. We’re backing a team determined to build a global AI company from a region we’re extremely optimistic about,” said Mariusz Adamski, Partner at ff Venture Capital.