LottieLab raised 3.7 million euros to upgrade GIF

LottlieLab just raised 3.7 million euros for the design platform of a new type of GIF in a funding round led by the company VC Point Nine. It also included podcaster Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, Entrepreneur First and some of the most important founders in the world, including Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin, Invision CEO Clark Valberg, former WordPress CPO Aadil Mamujee, Slack Tamar Yehoshua’s CPO, Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, former Twitter VP Rob Bishop and former Product Hunt CEO Josh Buckley.

London-based Startup was founded in 2021 by Andrew Ologunebi and Alistair Thomson, who wanted to create a new generation animation tool that could take on GIF. The two founders decided to explore the wider field of animation, finding that the traditional GIF had some limitations and is not always suitable for its purpose.People are increasingly consuming content in video format, but GIFs take up a lot of space in apps and sites while not being interactive in the truest sense of the term. They also cannot be exported as code and therefore cannot be easily brought under control by the developers.

The emergence of the Lottie file type in 2017 made it easier to create high-fidelity animations and export them as code. Lottie animations enable scalable vector animations on web, mobile and desktop, which are used in over 80% of the top 100 apps in the App Store. But working with Lottie animation today still requires the use of Adobe After Effects, a 30-year-old VFX tool with a steep learning curve – that’s where the Startup intervenes.

LottieLab is a browser-based animation platform for teams that create intuitive digital experiences. The team created from scratch the easiest tool for Lottie animation workflows, solving the problems of existing designers and reducing the barrier to entry in interaction design.

With LottieApp, users can create animations with an intuitive tool built exclusively for Lottie – making compatibility errors and problems with add-ons a thing of the past. It also allows integration with existing workflows, collaboration of the entire team, and enables teams to deploy UX animations up to five times faster than other platforms.

Users can also build, collaborate, manage, and deploy animation assets on their websites and apps faster and easier than ever before. This means that customers can reap all the benefits of their animations as code, especially performance and interactivity, without having to encode them.

By enabling product groups to manage the entire animation process on a centralized platform, the value of animation assets increases only to allow for smoother collaboration throughout the animation development process, regardless of individual skills. LottieLab seizes a potential multi-billion dollar opportunity annually, which so far has been somewhat ignored in the design industry.By effectively and efficiently saving companies time and money through the democratization of the animation production process, LottieLab has the potential to become the de facto animation tool for creators.

Despite the fact that it only launched in July, the LottieLab team has already doubled with recent hires as soon as they learned about the product through the growing beta community.The reception from users on the discord channel was impressive, with new use cases emerging every day, from personalized e-commerce outfits to dynamic content for streamers. Within a few months, thousands of users have already subscribed to the product’s waiting list, including designers and developers from TikTok, Canva, Airbnb, Twitter, Duolingo, Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and others.

The new funding will allow LottieLab to triple its team over the next year, with the vast majority of these new hires involved product development as the team tries to attract the best talent.