Electric Sheep, an AI tech startup in visual effects (VFX), has closed an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round for $500,000. The round was filled by AI-focused VCs, led by Dasein Capital (US), and backed by Spatial Capital (US) and Look AI Ventures (Czech Republic), who shared the news with AIN.Capital.
- Founded by Jake Laver, Gary Palmer and Richie Murray, Electric Sheep is pioneering a solution to automate flawless background removal for TV and film. This process, known as rotoscoping, is essential before adding special effects. Currently, the only way to deliver the detail needed for the big screen is to manually cut around foregrounds frame-by-frame.
- This process takes around 6 hours for 1 second of footage and costs the industry over $1.5 billion per year. Electric Sheep’s cloud-native solution, Spotlight, is 360x faster, processing 1 second of footage in less than a minute.
“Electric Sheep’s cutting-edge cloud and AI platform are poised to revolutionise several core VFX workflows. They’re taking a smart and pragmatic approach to accelerate some of the most tedious post-production tasks,”
Steven Sullivan, Partner at Spatial Capital and former Senior Technology Officer of LucasFilm, says.
- The $500,000 round was led by the US-based fund Dasein Capital, and joined by Spatial Capital, also from the US, as well as Look AI Ventures, the first investment fund in the Czech Republic that focuses exclusively on AI startups worldwide.
“We are excited to partner with three investors with considerable experience in AI, VFX, and building at scale. Flawless background removal negates the need for onset green screens, empowering creatives to capture the energy of the scene without compromising the final image,”
Gary Palmer, CEO at Electric Sheep, comments.
- Electric Sheep will use this capital injection to build and enhance Spotlight, the industry’s first AI rotoscoping tool capable of the detail needed for Hollywood.
