Cartwheel Launches 3D Animation Platform for Storytelling

“Like what the iPhone did for photography, we believe Cartwheel will do for animation,” said Jonathan Jarvis and Andrew Carr, Cartwheel’s Co-founders. “We’ve developed a new way to simplify the animation process, putting creatives in the drivers’ seat as they dramatically accelerate their workflows, eliminate tedious tasks, free up budget for more creative exploration, and enhance control over their final products. It’s a game-changing approach for people across industries and we’re beyond excited about its potential to transform the future of animated film, anime, gaming, advertising and storyboarding, social media and more.”

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Leveraging advanced technology, Cartwheel turns video, text and large motion libraries into production-ready 3D character animations that are easy to move, edit and download directly into current workflows. Professional animators can rapidly prototype ideas in any 3D format, make major refinements or subtle tweaks using Cartwheel or their preferred 3D software, and unlike other generative tools, eliminate disruptive changes to their existing pipelines. Animators can also access Cartwheel’s robust library and quickly find a motion to fit or inspire their scene, while more novice creators can swiftly generate video clips, and designers and developers can turn their character animations into files that can simply be dropped into their apps or websites.

Cartwheel’s unique formula of eliminating hours of repetitive work, and in turn, opening up time to explore more in-depth story telling, has made the company a hotbed for some of the most respected talent across industries. This includes the company’s co-founders Andrew Carr, Cartwheel’s Chief Scientist and former scientist at OpenAI who built code generation for codex and chatGPT and Jonathan Jarvis, Cartwheel’s CEO and former director at Google, where he was a founding member of the Google Creative Lab and launched a wide array of new products and features for Google Brain, Search, Android, and Workspaces, as well as led animation studio Universal Patterns. It also includes a diverse team of creative luminaries from Riot Games, Sony, Unity and more.

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Joining its team is Catherine Hicks, former animation director for Pixar known for her incredible work on over 15 movies including the Oscar winning teams for Inside Out, Coco, Toy Story 3, as the company’s new head of animation innovation and Neil Helm, who was heralded for his creative vision and deep understanding of motion at Pixar, working on Inside Out 2, Turning Red, Lightyear, and Toy Story 3 & 4, as its new head of interactive animation.

The company’s layered experience across a variety of creative disciplines has also attracted a number of influential backers. This includes a fresh $10M round (bringing total funding to $15.6M), led by Craft Ventures, along with Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, Ben Feder’s Tirta Ventures and Runway, and with participation from existing investors Accel, Khosla and Human Ventures. Cartwheel will use the infusion of new funds to continue to train its motion models, attract new talent, and ramp up marketing efforts to get the word out.

“Animation is fundamental to the biggest, most beloved entertainment franchises and experiences in the world. Cartwheel will help animators to expand the frontier of what is possible,” said Lainy Painter Singh, partner at Craft Ventures. “We believe the next decade will see animators create experiences and worlds that people  only dream of, while welcoming in an entirely new, much larger generation of creatives to the art.”

“Cartwheel has changed the entire paradigm of animation by introducing a new toolset that builds on the artistry of animation, making productions more efficient so more stories can be told,” said Ben Feder, Managing Partner at Tirta Ventures. “Where concepts could take days, weeks, or months to visualize, Cartwheel’s technology makes the process virtually instant, unleashing an entirely new world of storytelling possibilities in video, games, advertising and many other sectors. We are proud to be investors in Cartwheel and look forward to enabling developers to benefit from this groundbreaking technology.”

Cartwheel’s launch comes at a time when indie animators and game designers are looking for new ways to share their stories at a fraction of the cost of using traditional animation tools.  To battle test its viability, while in closed Beta, Cartwheel was used by creatives from top companies including: Dreamworks, Duolingo, Sony, Roblox and more, who were all eager to see if they could integrate Cartwheel’s tools easily into their workflow. The results were clear, with many reporting that Cartwheel integrates smoothly into existing workflows and offers new ways to experiment, iterate, and animate faster.

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Source – PR Newswire

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