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 Yao-Hung 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.
The company’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 lets users integrate third-party models from OpenAI, Runway, and others for tasks such as post generation, motion stylization, and scene composition.
Cheehoo didn’t announce any launch partners, but the company said that it is already working with several IP holders, studios, and creators. Cheehoo has raised $10 million in funding led by Greycroft, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Basis Set, Headline Asia, Powerhouse Capital, Playground Productions, and Rideback.
Brentt Baltimore, principal at Greycroft, said that the venture firm has always been inclined to make investments in companies that create “new age” media. He added that he thinks Cheehoo has the right mix of Hollywood, media, and technology DNA to solve problems in animation pipelines.
“Cheehoo has an opportunity to reduce the cost of animation production overall,” Baltimore said in an interview. “That means it can have sophisticated creators can easily create animation films without having an expensive studio setup. Using … AI, the company is trying to put enterprise or big studio-level workflows into a tool enabling independent filmmakers to individuals to be creative with animation features. It [is] also doing all this while providing creative control to users, which creatives have always wanted.”
Looking to the future, LoFaso said that while Cheehoo is working mainly with enterprises and prosumers, it intends to roll out more consumer-focused products. That may help Cheehoo compete against startups like Accel-backed Cartwheel and Naver-backed Cinamon, which are also building tools to help simplify aspects of animation production.