Motion design platform LottieLab has secured $4m (£3.1m) in its seed funding round led by Point Nine.
London-based LottieLab will use the fresh capital to triple its headcount over the next year, predominantly on the product development team.
Founders Andrew Ologunebi and Alistair Thomson created LottieLab after becoming frustrated by the limitations of the GIF format when creating motion-powered graphics. GIFs, they found, take up a lot of storage space, are not interactive and cannot be exported as a piece of code.
This led to the pair, who met at startup accelerator programme Entrepreneur First, creating the Lottie file type in 2017 for animation creation and the ability to export the file as code.
Now LottieLab offers a browser-based end-to-end animation platform that can create animations, integrate existing workflows, collaborate and deploy animations.
“With LottieLab, we are decluttering the motion design process and bringing it into the 21st century. LottieLab has all the benefits of modern design tools fit for today’s product development teams; being web-based, collaborative and simple, and crucially, there’s no After Effects qualification needed to use it,” said Andrew Ologunebi, CEO, LottieLab.
LottieLab’s software is being used by companies such as TikTok, Canva, Airbnb, Twitter, Duolingo, Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
Other investors include 20VC, Entrepreneur First and a range of angel investors such as CEO of Squarespace Anthony Casalena, CPO of Slack Tamar Yehoshua and former VP at Twitter Rob Bishop.
Point Nine is a European early-stage venture capital firm that invests primarily in B2B SaaS and B2B marketplace startups. Prior investments range from Loom, Typeform and Revolut, which this week halted Ukrainian refugee referrals after customer exploitation.
“Tools like Figma and Canva have democratised creative design for millions of people, but when it comes to animations, things haven’t changed much in the last decade,” said Christoph Janz, partner, Point Nine.
The post LottieLab raises £3m to spruce up GIF animation format appeared first on UKTN | UK Tech News.
