Moth and Flame

Moth and Flame started in 2015 as an innovation shop focused on entertainment and virtual reality projects. Kevin Cornish and his team built award-winning VR experiences, but they were largely one-off creative endeavors. The real inflection point came in 2019 when Accenture approached them about building VR training experiences for child welfare workers. This marked a strategic pivot from innovation projects to building a productized platform.

Rather than continue as a services-only shop, Kevin and team saw an opportunity: enterprises desperately needed VR training content but creating custom experiences was expensive and time-consuming. They built an immersive learning platform with three core components: an off-the-shelf content library, authoring tools, and an analytics dashboard. The pricing model was deliberately designed around behavior change rather than one-time events—they charge per experience ($4,500-$8,500/month) or per seat ($180/year) for their marketplace content, ensuring customers stayed engaged for sustained learning.

The Accenture relationship grew into a major reseller partnership. One compelling proof point: a state using their platform for child welfare worker training reduced first-year churn by 30% by letting job candidates experience the role in VR before committing to expensive training. By 2024, they had landed major clients including the US Air Force for training programs. Their marketplace launched in September with strong early traction: one customer in September, expanding to five customers across November-December, with projections of five new customers per month by February-March.

Bootstrapping worked until 2024, but scaling revealed the need for capital. Kevin raised a $2.7M seed round to build out a no-code builder tool and productize synthetic media and natural language processing capabilities. The key insight was discovering a truly scalable business model: when they created Air Force suicide prevention content and sold user licenses (10,000 first year, expanding to 25,000 the second), they realized they had found product-market fit. The marketplace model proved powerful—off-the-shelf content allowed enterprises to avoid huge upfront costs while still getting VR's superior training effectiveness (vs. 20% effectiveness of e-learning).

In 2024, Moth and Flame hit $5M in total revenue with $2M recurring (40% of revenue), up from $2.5M last year ($200k recurring). They're operating with 19 people on product/engineering and 39 total. Gross margins hit 75-80% on subscription and 50% on services. Kevin recently launched a bridge round rolling into a Series A targeting $10-12M to fund R&D on synthetic media and NLP—essentially building tools to auto-generate VR dialogue and character expressions, turning VR creation from bespoke to commodity. With 15-20 total customers today and clear roadmap to 70% recurring revenue next year, they're positioning themselves as "Squarespace for VR."

Last month (December) the team hit $280k in SaaS-only revenue, validating the shift from services to product.