CONTRUDO:
Animation startup Cheehoo has secured $10 million in a funding round co-led by Greycroft and Point72 Ventures. The company aims to disrupt the traditionally expensive and labor-intensive animation industry by deploying AI-powered tools designed to streamline professional creative workflows.
Bridging Hollywood Experience with AI Innovation
Born from the production company Rideback—the team behind the Lego Movie franchise—Cheehoo combines deep industry expertise with advanced technical research. The founding team includes Rideback co-CEOs Michael LoFaso and Jonathan Eirich, co-founder Dan Lin, former DreamWorks Animation president Chris deFaria, and former Apple AI researchers Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai and Wei-Cheng Kuo.
According to LoFaso, the startup was created to solve the bottlenecks of modern animation, where storyboarding, rendering, and lighting often become prohibitively complex and costly for creators.
Optimizing the Animation Pipeline
Cheehoo’s platform is designed to integrate seamlessly with industry-standard software like Maya and Unreal Engine. The toolset focuses on accelerating the prototyping and iteration phases by automating labor-intensive tasks such as:
- Data annotation and file conversions.
- Maintaining format consistency across production stages.
- Real-time animation adjustments and rendering.
The platform utilizes proprietary AI models for character and asset creation, while providing the flexibility to integrate third-party models from providers like OpenAI and Runway for motion stylization, scene composition, and post-generation tasks.
Democratizing Studio-Level Production
Brentt Baltimore, a principal at Greycroft, highlighted that the investment addresses a critical gap in media production. “Cheehoo has an opportunity to reduce the cost of animation production overall,” Baltimore noted. “It enables sophisticated creators to produce animated films without requiring an expensive studio setup, putting enterprise-level workflows into the hands of independent filmmakers.”
Future Roadmap and Market Position
While Cheehoo is currently focused on serving enterprise studios and prosumers, the company plans to expand into consumer-focused products. This strategy positions the firm to compete directly with emerging players like Cartwheel and Cinamon in the rapidly evolving generative animation space.
In addition to Greycroft and Point72 Ventures, the funding round saw participation from Basis Set, Headline Asia, Powerhouse Capital, Playground Productions, and Rideback.