Cartwheel has officially launched its suite of 3D animation AI tools to the public. Emerging out of closed beta, where the company amassed over 60,000 creatives on the waitlist alone, Cartwheel’s new suite of tools is caters to both professionals and brand-new 3D animation explorers by removing technical bottlenecks to make creating faster, easier and more accessible.
“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.”
What it does:
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.
The Cartwheel team is made up of talents from across the technology and animation 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 veterans from Riot Games, Sony, Unity and more.
Recent additions to the team is the company’s new Head of Animation Innovation Catherine Hicks, former animation director for Pixar known for her work on over 15 movies, including with the Oscar-winning crew of Inside Out, Coco and Toy Story 3, and fellow Pixar alum Neil Helm, who worked on Inside Out 2, Turning Red, Lightyear and Toy Story 3 & 4, taking on the role of Head of Interactive Animation at Cartwheel.
The company has also attracted a number of influential backers. This includes a fresh $10 million 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.
“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 today’s developers to benefit from this groundbreaking technology.”
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 found that Cartwheel’s tools integrated smoothly into existing workflows and offered new ways to experiment, iterate and animate faster.
For more information about Cartwheel and how to access its free suite of tools, visit getcartwheel.com.
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