The AI filmmaking company teaching movies to speak every language - while keeping the actor's actual performance. Makers of TrueSync and DeepEditor.
In a London editing bay on Meard Street, a Swedish actor opens his mouth and out comes flawless American English. His lips agree. His face agrees. Nothing about it looks dubbed. This is Flawless, and the trick it has spent years perfecting is convincing you that no trick happened at all.
Flawless is an AI company that works in film and television, which is a sentence most of Hollywood would have flinched at five years ago. The fear was reasonable. "AI" and "filmmaking" in the same breath usually meant synthetic actors, scraped likenesses, and a lawyer somewhere drafting a cease-and-desist. Flawless took the opposite bet: build AI that protects the performance instead of replacing it.
The company's products - TrueSync and DeepEditor - do something narrow and difficult. They reshape an actor's lip movements and expressions, frame by frame, so a film can be re-voiced in another language or have a single line changed without a reshoot. The original performance stays. The mouth simply learns the new words.
"It is not a synthetic actor. It is the same actor, given a second mouth for a second language."
- The whole pitch, in one lineHere is the tension Flawless exists to resolve. The world makes great films in dozens of languages, and then ruins them at the border. Subtitles ask you to read a movie instead of watch it. Traditional dubbing replaces the voice but leaves the lips out of sync, so your brain spends the whole film quietly objecting. Either way, the performance - the thing the actor actually did - gets compromised.
Director Scott Mann learned this the hard way. He watched a foreign-language dub mangle the timing and meaning of his own thriller, including, famously, a line that turned blunt dialogue into nonsense. The performance he had fought for on set was gone by the time it reached an overseas audience. The film industry treated this as the cost of doing global business. Mann treated it as a bug.
"Subtitles split your attention. Dubbing breaks the spell. Both quietly tell the audience: this film was not made for you."
- The case against the status quoFlawless was founded in 2019 by Scott Mann, a working film director, and Nick Lynes, a tech and e-commerce entrepreneur. One knew exactly how a performance is built and how easily it breaks. The other knew how to build software that scales. Their bet was that the disconnect of dubbing was not a creative problem to be tolerated but a computer-vision problem to be solved.
The wager had a second, riskier half. They decided to do it with the industry rather than to it - looping in actors, securing consent, and engaging SAG-AFTRA early, at a moment when most AI startups were sprinting in the other direction. It is a slower road. It is also the only road on which Hollywood actually opens the door.
Film director whose frustration with a bad dub of his own movie helped spark the company. Brings the on-set view of what a performance is worth.
Tech and e-commerce veteran who served as co-CEO before moving to chairman. The operator who turned a director's grievance into a company.
Stanford engineer, former MySpace COO, and co-founder of Gravity (sold to AOL for $100M). Joined the board in 2024, then the corner office.
"Amit is now a close personal friend and a vital third leg to our leadership."
- Nick Lynes, on Kapur becoming co-CEOThe engineering is genuinely clever. TrueSync builds a volumetric 3D model of each actor's face across an entire film, then reshapes it to match newly recorded dialogue in another language. The result plays natively - no subtitles, no rubbery dub. DeepEditor brings the same capability into the edit, letting teams fix a line, adjust a performance, or handle censorship cuts without dragging cast and crew back to set.
Surrounding both is the part Flawless wants you to notice: a rights framework it calls the Artistic Rights Treasury. Models are used per-project, not trained on the open world. Consent is recorded. The outputs are cinema-grade and copyrightable, certified to SOC2, ISO 27001 and MPA standards. The ethics, in other words, are built into the product rather than bolted onto the press release.
Visual dubbing that re-aligns lips and expressions to a translated voice track, so a film plays naturally in any language with the original performance intact.
In-vision ADR, performance transfer and dialogue changes - swap a line or refine a take without a costly reshoot.
The Artistic Rights Treasury: records informed actor consent and governs how a performance may be edited. The paperwork, made into a feature.
Demos are easy. Theaters are not. The clearest proof point is "Watch the Skies," originally the Swedish film "UFO Sweden," visually dubbed into English and released theatrically in the United States - the first time a feature was put in front of paying audiences entirely on the strength of AI visual dubbing. It later landed on Prime Video. Studios do not put unproven tech on 100 screens.
The reach extends past one film. Flawless reports its tools have been used across hundreds of studio productions, with partnerships spanning Avid, Deluxe and Pixelogic to put visual dubbing inside professional workflows, plus AWS underneath. The numbers below are estimates drawn from public reporting, so read them as the shape of a business rather than audited accounts.
"Studios do not put unproven technology on a hundred screens. They put it on a slide and wait."
- Why a theatrical release mattersFlawless states its mission plainly: protect artistic rights, real performances and human authorship while expanding creative opportunity across film and television. It is an unusual mission for an AI company, because it leads with a limit rather than a capability. The word the company keeps using is "assistive" - it even won the first Lumiere Award created for assistive, not generative, AI.
That word is doing real work. Generative AI promises to make things without people. Assistive AI promises to make people's work travel further. For an industry still raw from strikes over exactly this question, the distinction is the difference between a vendor and a defendant.
"They have full consent through this whole thing."
- Scott Mann, on the actorsIf Flawless is right, the border between film markets quietly dissolves. A series shot in Seoul reaches Sao Paulo with the original cast's faces and a Brazilian voice, and no one reads a word. A studio refreshes a campaign or fixes a line years after the shoot. The catalog of world cinema, currently gated by language, opens up. That is a large prize, and Flawless is not alone reaching for it - audio-dubbing and lip-sync rivals are circling the same opportunity.
The open questions are honest ones. Audiences may decide they want their foreign films foreign. Consent frameworks have to hold up in practice, not just in marketing. And "assistive" is a promise a company has to keep every quarter, not just at award shows. Skeptics are right to wait for the receipts.
"Back in that London editing bay, the Swedish actor speaks American English, and his lips never give him away. The performance crossed a border without a passport. That was the whole idea."
- Return to the opening sceneFlawless did not invent a synthetic star or a faster way to fake one. It built a careful machine for letting real performances travel - and then wrapped it in the paperwork that lets Hollywood say yes. Whether the world wants its movies seamless or wants them strange, the company has already proven the harder half: the trick works, and no one in the theater notices it happened.