LDV Capital Leads Aquifer’s $2M Seed To Make Animation as Easy as Point-and-Shoot

Today, a professional animator creates about 4 seconds of video footage per day. That means to create a 40 min episode like the Netflix #1 global hit, Arcane, it likely took expert animators at least 75,000 hours. 

With their AI-powered animation platform, Aquifer gives content creators with no technical animation skills the power to produce cinematic-quality animated content in minutes. 

We are honored to lead their $2M Seed financing along with Boost VC, Geekdom Fund, Wedbush Ventures, Techstars and strategic angels. Aquifer is adding more talent to their team in machine learning, engineering, and sales. 

With a few clicks, marketing executives and anyone on their teams can leverage the Aquifer platform to turn their brand mascots and icons into studio-quality animated characters who can appear across social media, interact with followers and become new revenue generators.

In our LDV Capital Insights research this summer on Content Creation & the Metaverse Powered by Visual Tech, we showcased that animated content is one of the fastest-growing video sectors - especially snackable, animated content. It will be a critical piece of content strategy over the coming years and a true differentiator.

So when we met Aquifer co-founders Chen Zhang and Matt Udvari, we knew instantly that they are onto something big with their visual tech tool that enables brands to upload their existing characters and make them into influencers in mere minutes by pairing markerless motion capture, automated 3D model importing and machine learning for scene authoring with 4K cloud rendering, cross-platform collaboration and livestream capabilities. 

What kind of following would Jinx, the lead character from Arcane, have on TikTok? What kind of sales could she bolster for Riot if she was able to interact with fans? If The Real Qai Qai is any example with her +1.5M followers and topping the Amazon toy chart within weeks of launch in 2020 (staying there even through this holiday season) animated characters have a growing amount of influence and power in our lives.

"Brands know the revenue potential of owning more unique and differentiated IP to engage their audiences in today’s fragmented media landscape, but need ways to rapidly create a high volume of relevant, cinematic content across TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitch and much more," says Chen Zhang, CEO and co-founder. 

Aquifer empowers teams to collaborate directly on their platform to record voice and translate the facial expressions of the actor onto the character. Aquifer then suggests body movements with their machine-learning assisted scene authoring and simplifies the video creation process with their data smoothing and processing algorithms. The final product is rendered in 4K in the cloud and an animated movie clip ready instantly to be live-streamed or shared on social media platforms.

"Most content creators are familiar with point-and-shoot video on their phones, so with Aquifer, we've made creating animated content that easy. You can make a cinematic video without learning a whole new set of skills", adds Matt Udvari, the company’s co-founder and CTO.

G2 Esports, one of the leading entertainment assets in esports, successfully launched their virtual mascot with Aquifer this summer and have big plans for the future. “Virtual ambassadors like Sami add breadth to our current and future content, and more importantly, build forever lasting strong IP. Aquifer's platform and innovative features give our teams the ease and flexibility to create exciting content across channels,” said Pierre Sesmat from G2’s Marketing and PR team.

Aquifer’s HQ is in Austin, TX but the team is distributed. Aquifer's product consists of an iOS mobile app, web dashboard, and upcoming desktop app that is used by customers like Crunchyroll, G2 Esports, and Round21, all of whom are expanding the influence of their brand with animated characters.

At LDV Capital, we invest in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis since founding in 2012. 

It is our immense privilege to partner with Aquifer and leverage our deep industry expertise in building deep technical content creation tools  and make studio-quality animation accessible to all brands and teams.

To learn more about Aquifer and Chen Zhang’s founder journey so far, check out our Women Leading Visual Tech interview with Chen, “The Future of Effortlessly Cinematic AI-powered Video Storytelling with Aquifer.”