ComfyUI raises $30M at $500M valuation as open-source AI creative platform hits Hollywood studios

taking you into a story about Coachella. It ran past curfew and it got fined. You will learn why music festivals may be the best way to understand data center permitting risk. After our next guest,

that's a narrative violation. We have Yoland Yan from Comfy in the waiting room with an iconic entrance. Let's take a look.

Let's go.

What are you holding here? Uh, please introduce yourself and the company. What are we looking at?

Let's [ __ ] go.

Yeah.

Please.

Welcome to the show. I'm

surprised. I'm surprised no one's ever pulled off an entrance like this.

No. No. This is exquisite. Uh, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little about what's going on.

My name is Yolan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Comfy. Um, I I apologize. Uh, I've been instructed that I can be anything but boring for this show. So, here I am.

That's true. You know, you you studied. You studied.

Yeah.

I did. I did.

What? What? Uh, tell us your entire life story from inception. No. What uh be there too many points for you to start over here. Uh let me let me remove the distraction for you for now.

What is the distraction? Give us the backstory like why that particular creature.

The distraction is a character created by my co-founder is actually the origin of this tool. It if it weren't for this character, we wouldn't be raising and becoming a half billion dollar company today. So congratulations. Shout out to the Fenic character.

Yeah. Uh so for those who don't know Comfy UI node-based workflow for uh visual design, video production uh you know Da Vinci Resolve level performance but for the modern era is that roughly correct how are you thinking about introducing the company?

Yeah. Yeah. Um Comfy is uh a a note-based system that aimed to uh give the highest leverage of control and quality for content creation. Uh I think if you guys uh think of you know let's say midjourney or text comp based

uh content creation using AI uh it's the polar opposite. It gives you every bit of control and possibility um

uh to adjust the model and uh control the camera angle, control the posture uh and that's exactly why Comfy ended up being adopted by these uh top studios around the world. Uh the recent Coca-Cola ad or Super Bowl ads were all made using Comfy.

Yeah. and then also inject a level of uh deterministic and programmatic variation into the generative AI workflows so that if you want to create multiple assets and you want to swap out a bear for a cat for a dog, you can do that in a way that doesn't just require you sitting there prompting waiting five minutes prompt again

actually parallelizing.

Yes, that makes sense. Uh so yeah, if you're working with big companies like are they just for forking the repo, downloading the open source project? Are they actually calling you? Are you doing implementation and and how do you how are you making money from all of this so far?

Yeah. Yeah, great question. Uh it started first as a uh open source project actually. It's a personal project to begin with. Yeah. Um and then uh originally a lot of the companies actually just ended up using it running on their own hardware u most of the time locally. Y uh we introduced comfy cloud as a product uh about five months ago

and the main uh differentiation in that world is that you can actually tap into uh a large cluster of compute that we provide in the back end. It's incredibly difficult to stitch everything together to provide this infrastructure level of support uh especially for like you know uh professional creative uh companies or uh uh studios. So yeah, that's kind of like you know how we monetize off of it.

How big of a deal is Cance 2.0? The videos that I saw were incredible. It felt a little bit inaccessible. Is it diffusing rapidly?

Yeah. Yeah. The entire visual AI ecosystem is is evolving very rapidly. These foundation models are making amazing progress. Uh and you can access all of these models on our platform as well. Uh we are generally agnostic in terms of whether it's open or closed source model. But just to comment on the progress over here, we're super excited to see like you know where the trend goes towards to when these uh Cance model gets uh launched onto Comfy platform. you see people kind of building on top of creating even better workflow

uh using these models and I can't wait for you know one day we'll just have Avatar being created in someone's uh you know bedroom and backyard

okay when over under 28 2028

give us your Hollywood predictions

when can I actually watch a 2hour movie an hour a 90minute movie because I've seen some incredible short films some incredible vibe reels 30 seconds I've seen yeah maybe 2 minutes 3 minutes

yeah everybody's seen like

there's probably longer stuff out there. I haven't gotten sucked into anything. I did watch all of Harry Potter Balenciaga. That was great. Uh, you know, but like I'm waiting for something that's Harry Potter Balenciaga level entertainment. Like hold my attention to the end, but 10 minutes, then 20 minutes, and then 90 minutes. And when the 90-minute thing happens, I think a lot of people are going to be like, "Wow."

Yeah. Uh, this is actually a part of an insight that most people don't really understand right now. Uh it's one uh on the quality side of the uh uh area. People don't want to create long form content. Uh because by the time when you finish a feature film length of a content, the model has shifted so much that you are you're running into this James Cameron problem of like oh [ __ ] I have to go back and then you know like rerun these using different models. Uh so a lot of times people focus on short clips uh in terms of the content. And then the other port portion is actually um it's already being adopted in a lot of these uh creative uh uh studios

and agencies using comfy. What it doesn't do is uh it doesn't become production. It just enter the previous uh portion. enable people to rapidly iterate and then create these content right away that you might have someone acting in a pure green screen and uh and then the output of it in five minutes you see the entire 3D CG rendering using AI uh on the uh on the system in comfy and in that world it's already influencing the direction or how they act it's just doesn't necessarily get to the quality where it uh completely could become a film uh production level of uh uh content Is there more to be learned from the cognition model or the cursor model in terms of training your own models versus being at the application layer? Both companies have been wildly successful. Huge. Yeah. Uh but very different paths.

Yeah. I believe the visual ecosystem is quite different. But the main uh differentiation is there's a huge amount of taste. Even if someone can prompt uh C dance 30.0 to generate a uh feature film tomorrow and it gets to the level of quality for the real creatives or for the people who want the taste and control to be in their own hand, it's still going to be a very iterative process. It's just going to make their life a lot easier. And that's what Comfy enables you to do. Um I think those are the kind of differentiation where in the coding world you might not care in terms of you know ah is this piece of code actually good enough but in the visual world you absolutely care the camera angle the the uh facial feature the the control layer and that's uh in my opinion what differentiates uh the you know the AI slops uh from the comfy uh ecosystem of creation. Mhm. What's the easiest AI feature to pitch to a Hollywood AI skeptic?

Uh the easiest uh way I would say from our perspective, this is might not be for everyone is the fact that uh we have this creative in the loop human in the loop centric belief and uh mechanism and it's actually true. Um, in a lot of these case scenario when people are using Comfy as a tool, it is actually empowering the creatives to to uh to do their work to skip all of these boring stuff of colorization of uh you know kind of upscaling downscaling manually in the traditional process. It it enables you. So those are the world where we're not actually taking jobs we're creating jobs. of anything you go search on, you know, any job site that today, there's actually a huge amount of people hiring for Comfy UI uh artists and specialists.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think like the the the Mount Everest is like, "Oh, well, one shot the movie, replace the actors." The easier stuff is uh what if your green screen was a little bit cleaner, you know? What what if uh your color grade was on your dailies as well? Um there's a whole bunch of interesting places where you can play. And I' I've said this before and and uh

uh at least some people were trying were calling me an idiot online, but uh I've had this idea that I think AI could actually help Hollywood. We're in Hollywood. There's a bunch of empty studios around. There's a bunch of people here that have been working in entertainment that haven't had great job prospects over the last few years, especially if they weren't willing to travel overseas. And it just feels like we're we're going to enter into an era where 10 really smart people could come into one room and if they work really hard and leverage AI properly, they can make it they'll be able to make an incredible, you know, short film, film, make beautiful advertisements, whatever they want to do. So I think we will enter into a golden age of uh human humanpowered AI powered humans doing

incredible creative work. You mentioned that you're currently valued at half a billion dollars. How much did you raise? Tell us about the funding news.

Yeah, we raised $30 million from uh

Oh, man. Been looking forward to this. Um yeah, we raised $30 million. The round was led by Craft Venture. Huge fan of folks over there. They've been tracking us for a while.

Um yeah, been amazing working with them so far.

Um super excited. We're here to destroy our enemies and uh make open source creative tooling win.

I love it,

dude. Imagine being imagine being your enemy right now logging on.

Oh, I think we talked to his enemy earlier this week. I'm not going to say who it was, but I think we know who he's coming for and I'm rooting for him.

Well, imagine logging on and seeing Mr. Yan and just being like, "Oh, it's over for me."

It's over for me.

Real real. I have no idea because we in our mind we don't really have an enemy. The only enemy is our

Oh, no. I'm not talking about I'm not talking about startup competitors. Uh I'm talking about

never heard of that word.

Yeah. Uh but congratulations. Thank you for everything you do. Incredibly cool tool. If you haven't already checked it out, go go download Comfy UI. Make some cool stuff. It's a lot of fun. Uh and have a great rest of your day.

Goodbye.