LottieLab raises $4M to enable designers to easily create product animations
Hey everyone, we are super excited to announce that we’ve raised $4M for our motion design and collaboration platform, LottieLab, in a seed round led by top SaaS seed investor, Point Nine.
The round also included participation from Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, previous investor Entrepreneur First, and some of the foremost product and design leaders such as Vlad Magdalin (CEO of Webflow), Clark Valberg (CEO of Invision), Aadil Mamujee (Ex CPO Wordpress), Tamar Yehoshua (CPO of Slack), Anthony Casalena (CEO of Squarespace), Rob Bishop (Former VP, Product at Twitter), Josh Buckley (Ex CEO of Product Hunt), Elena Verna (Ex CMO of Miro) and more.
We are building THE best editing tool for ‘Lottie animations’, the fastest growing animation format. We see this as the natural extension of the exciting work that Gabriel Peal, Hernan Torrisi, Brandon Withrow and all the Airbnb pioneers did with Lottie. Lottie animations enable scalable vector animations on web, mobile and desktop and are now used in over 80% of the top 100 apps on the App Store. The format is on a rapid trajectory towards becoming the industry standard as it allows the creation of dynamic animations without coding.
However, working with Lottie animations today still requires the use of Adobe After Effects, a 30-year-old visual effects tool that’s not fit for purpose, has a steep learning curve, and requires a patchwork of error-prone plugins and technical knowledge. We’ve seen first-hand the frustrations a lot of designers (including myself) and other product professionals have had with this.
We are bringing this cluttered motion design process into the 21st century, with all the benefits of modern design tooling fit for today’s product development teams — being web-based, collaborative and simple — no After Effects qualification needed. This is one of the first steps we are taking towards our mission of democratising motion design and storytelling for everyone, everywhere, and to make the web more fun through animations.’
Since we initially introduced LottieLab to the world in August last year, we’ve been making more ripples in the design and motion space. Several thousands of users are signed up to our waitlist including designers and developers from TikTok, Canva, Airbnb, Twitter, Duolingo, Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and more. We’ve had the opportunity to present our vision on stages like Web Summit to an audience of 40,000 people. Honestly, it’s been insane!
In the past few months, we’ve been really really heads-down in product development, experimenting and iteratively testing our private beta in order to not just build an animation tool copying existing non-usable paradigms but returning to first principles.
How do we build an animation tool that intuitively maps to the mental model of how people create motion, a UX so easy that even I even test with my 8-year old cousins?
We have learned so much from our early users and are doubling down on this. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child and as easily creating delightful animations means so much to us designers and makers of products, we want to go through every step of this journey with our community to build something that we all love.
I and Alistair (CTO), met on Entrepreneur First, a startup accelerator program. The idea for LottieLab emerged from conversations about our own frustrations creating high-quality motion-powered digital experiences as we’re both design and animation fanatics who have initially, independent from each other, created products used by millions of people globally.
It is great validation to have the backing of some of the most exciting investors in the industry, ones who deeply understand and resonate with our passion for what we’re building. We were very selective in working only with investors who feel like natural extensions of our teams. They have been just as excited as our customers about what we’re building so they pieced together this super cool video, check it out:
It’s gone from just two of us to a team of 5 really hands-on designers and engineers with a background in creative projects and tooling, so yeah, we geek out hard on this. This new funding allows us to further our experimentations and hire people that are excited about the idea of building the next-generation animation tool from the ground up and all the graphic-related challenges that come with it. If you think that’s you, you can apply to join us or drop me an email: drew@lottielab.io.
You can also find news of our seed announcements here:
