Reka, the San Francisco AI lab building multimodal models for the physical world, has merged with Moonvalley, the Toronto-based video generation startup known for its copyright-clean Marey model. The deal brings a team of researchers and engineers with pedigrees from Google DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Wayve, and Runway into Reka's fold, and signals a sharp pivot toward what both companies are calling the "physical AI era."

The Talent Is the Deal

The merger brings Mateusz Malinowski, PhD and Mikołaj Bińkowski, PhD along with a team of former DeepMind, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Wayve, and Runway researchers and engineers to Reka. Malinowski, previously a staff research scientist, and Bińkowski, previously a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, were both key contributors to models that became Google's Veo. That lineage matters: Veo is currently one of the most capable video generation systems in the world, and the people who built its predecessor are now working on something more ambitious.

The acquisition was structured as an all-share exchange deal. Moonvalley was founded in 2023 and had raised $154 million from General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator, among others. Reka itself has raised $167 million in total. No cash valuation for the combined entity has been disclosed publicly.

What They Are Actually Building

The centerpiece of the combined effort is a model called WLAM -- short for World Language Action Model. This is a class of AI that goes beyond generating video or answering questions: it tries to understand the physical rules of the world well enough to simulate what will happen next, and then act on that prediction.

The combined team will focus on WLAM, a unique omni model trained on egocentric and other physical world data to perceive and act in the real world by performing realistic simulation for planning. The model can generate high-fidelity multimodal outputs, translate multimodal perception to robotic execution due to its state-of-the-art spatial and temporal awareness, and perform nuanced reasoning over long-form and streaming video.