AI animation startup Cheehoo lands $10M funding from Greycroft

Summary

Creating animation is a time-consuming process, requiring multiple steps including storyboarding, rendering, composition, and lighting to craft a single scene. If a director wants to experiment with a different take for a scene, an animation team has to go back and tweak things before the scene can be finalized. Cheehoo, a startup founded by a mix of Hollywood execs and technologists, wants to create an AI-powered tool to make it easier for creatives to produce animated content. The startup was born out of production company Rideback, which produced the Lego Movie franchise. Rideback’s co-CEOs, Michael LoFaso and Jonathan Eirich, are a part of Cheehoo’s founding team along with Rideback co-founder Dan Lin. Other founding members include former President of DreamWorks Animation Chris deFaria and ex-Apple AI researchers Hubert Tsai and Wei-Cheng Kuo. In a conversation with TechCrunch, LoFaso said that Cheehoo wants to lead the way for studios and creators to bring their animation to life. “What we found through Rideback is that in Hollywood, the process of creating animation was getting expensive and complex,” LoFaso said. “It was starting to become tougher for creators to get their idea out in the world. We wanted to create a tool that was native to the workflows of creators and make their lives easier.” Cheehoo’s tools provide creators a way to prototype and iterate on animation rapidly. They help with tasks like data annotation, file conversions, and format consistency, allowing creators to move between different steps of the animation process. Cheehoo’s workflow, which can integrate with existing platforms like Maya or Unreal, allows users to make changes in animation and see the results right away. Creators can turn AI features on or off to take more control of the editing process. Cheehoo uses in-house AI models to assist with character and asset creation, and also lets users integrate third-party models from OpenAI, Runway, and others for tasks such as post gen...