In years past, when a great athlete retired, they typically told their story through a ghost-written memoir or perhaps even a biopic. But Hall of Fame basketball player Carmelo Anthony opted instead for the storytelling medium of the moment, striking a partnership with Utopai Studios, the Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in AI movies and TV shows. The 41-year-old NBA legend will produce AI-generated video content about his life and other sports stories through his Creative 7 Productions label. Anthony’s investment into Utopai—which both sides declined to share the size of, but Forbes estimates around $5 million—was at a staggering $1 billion valuation.

It’s an astronomical amount for a company with revenue that Forbes estimates was less than $50 million in 2025, and has yet to put out a full-length movie or TV show. Still, with projects in the pipeline and strong 2026 projections, the premium price tag announces Utopai as a true competitor in the ongoing Hollywood AI arms race.

“What stood out to me wasn’t just how advanced the technology is, but the vision and intention behind it,” Anthony tells Forbes in a prepared statement. “Sports has always been grounded in real human stories that can translate to powerful entertainment IP, but bringing those stories to life hasn’t always been easy. [Utopai] changes that. It gives us a more accessible way to create and build something with long-term value.”

In the notoriously insular Hollywood community, Utopai’s 25-year-old cofounder Cecilia Shen certainly does not fit the traditional mold of a movie mogul. Born in China and raised in Toronto, Shen dropped out of the University of Waterloo during the pandemic and took an AI job at the Royal Bank of Canada and then landed at Google’s moonshot factory X, where she met cofounder Jie Yang, a research lead and software engineer. In 2022 they founded what was then known as Cybever, initially developing AI tools to generate 3D environments for use in videogame development, before seeing its potential in film and television.

Shen and Yang were far from the only ones with the idea. According to one industry report, more than 65 new AI studios have launched since 2022. Most exist somewhere in the murky middle ground between AI-assisted workflow efficiencies on one end and completely AI-generated creative output on the other. The excitement about AI has set off both an existential panic among Hollywood’s union and guild members (whose jobs may soon be obsolete) and a frenzy among the investor and executive class, many of whom have spent the last few years placing bets on the companies they think can become dominant players.

Last December, Disney struck a $1 billion deal with OpenAI (though it was cancelled in April when OpenAI shut down its Sora platform); Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaking toolkit InterPositive for as much as $600 million; Fox Entertainment took a stake in the AI-powered microdrama studio Holywater; Lionsgate partnered with Runway AI; former Fox chairman Peter Chernin and CAA cofounder Michael Ovitz are investors in Promise AI; and Paramount backer RedBird Capital is funding B5 Studios, whose executive team includes former Disney film chief Sean Bailey and legendary producer Jeff Silver.

Utopai has its own traditional Hollywood backers, gaining early investment from PlutoTV and former Paramount+ president Tom Ryan.

“I think there’s a lot of investor excitement around, ‘What’s the future of the industry going to be?’” says Bryn Mooser, founder of Asteria Film Co., a competitor whose parent company closed a $84 million fundraising round last summer. “The real question is going to be, in the long run, who's still standing in this?”

Investments in AI production are far more speculative at this point than sure things. No one has yet produced a feature-length or even episode-length piece of AI storytelling that has become commercially viable.

“Long-form is a total empty market right now,” says Shen, a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2026. “We want to really monopolize the entire long-form content market.”

Shen is banking on PAI, Utopai’s new proprietary storytelling platform released in March, becoming the new market leader. The procedural content generation engine allows character models to be designed once and used in multiple scenes, and with it a filmmaker can select camera angles, edit a performance and environment, and iterate without needing to re-render the entire sequence.

In the first 60 days since PAI’s release, Utopai has earned $11 million in annual recurring revenue by licensing the technology to several production companies around the world. Shen believes there are plenty more customers in other countries, and in the United States if consumer brands or other sports figures want to follow Anthony’s lead into producing their own content. Another NBA all-star, James Harden, partnered with Utopai on a short-form animated video in April.

While revenue continues to climb, from $750,000 in 2024 to an estimated $7.5 million through the first half of 2025, Shen decided last August it would be impossible to achieve her ambitions simply as a technology provider. She rebranded Cybever as Utopai Studios, and began funding a slate of original film and television productions.

“The problem is that selling the tool and positioning us as the next generation of a [visual effects] company, isn't sexy at all,” says Shen. “You can't become a $10 billion dollar company as just a technology provider, you have to become a studio.”

But gaining the trust of the Hollywood community will take time, and relationships. Shen brought in Marco Weber as co-CEO, a veteran indie film producer who controlled the IP for a sci-fi TV series helmed by Roland Emmerich (director of Independence Day) called Space Nation, and was a producer on a feature-length historical epic, Cortés, written by Oscar-nominated writer Nicholas Kazan, who was long told the script was “unfilmable” by Hollywood studios. “It was always impossible,” Kazan said in the project’s announcement. “Too big, too expensive, just always ‘too.’”

However, Weber left Utopai in January to start his own production shingle, Ex Machina Studios (also backed by Tom Ryan), and retained a majority stake in Space Nation. Utopai owns the rest, and will remain on as a co-producer and tech provider, participating in a percentage of the profits and getting a crash course in what it will take to launch Cortés—a property Utopai fully owns—and other future projects.

The potential for enormous profits awaits the first person to master these new filmmaking tools. Shen estimates only 30-40 people are needed to work on a project like Cortés, 10 creatives and the rest in tech support. That’s compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, needed for a similar project without AI. While she declines to share the cost of the productions, Forbes estimates they could be less than $10 million each, a pittance compared to the $250 million-plus price tag associated with blockbusters like this year’s The Odyssey or Dune: Part Three.

That cost efficiency creates the opportunity for substantial profit, as Weber’s Ex Machina and Utopai successfully pre-sold some of the international distribution rights to broadcasters like Globo TV in Brazil and ZDF Studios in Germany, at the existing competitive market rates for non-AI content.

Contingent upon delivery of the final product, Forbes estimates Space Nation and Cortés could fetch as much as an estimated $110 million combined, with further upside if they can sell in other territories or to global streaming services. And for Utopai, they serve as marketing vehicles in those countries for production companies who may want to license the PAI toolkit.

It’s a clever synergy, because Shen says she’s found far less hesitancy internationally around AI-generated content. Countries like Indonesia, Malaysia or Colombia are hungry for more localized movies and TV shows, which they historically do not have the budget to create at scale without AI assistance. Elsewhere, Utopai signed a deal in April with Huace, one of the leading film and TV producers in China, where AI-generated microdramas are already a $16 billion industry and AI characters already appear in theatrically released movies.

Whether or not such content can find an audience or be widely accepted in the U.S. remains to be seen. To the industry, Shen is saying all the right things, emphasizing Utopai’s copyright-free training dataset, a willingness to work with the guilds, and the need to preserve creative decision-making.

“A lot of people are not scared of the technology,” says Shen. “And for the people that are just a little bit hesitant, I think when they see our approach, they will feel much better.”

This story was updated at 6:30pm on May 21 to include more information about Marco Weber and Ex Machina Studios.

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