• Create, collaborate on, manage and instantly deploy animation more easily than ever
• Designers and developers from TikTok, Canva, Airbnb, Twitter, Duolingo, Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are using this successor to GIF

London: LottieLab, the motion design and collaboration platform for product teams that has created a worthy successor to the much-loved GIF, has today announced a $4 million seed round led by early-stage VC firm Point Nine. 

The funding round also included participation from podcaster-turned-investor Harry Stebbings’s 20VC, Entrepreneur First, and some of the world’s most prominent founders such as CEO of Webflow, Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Invision Clark Valberg, former CPO of WordPress Aadil Mamujee, the CPO of Slack Tamar Yehoshua, CEO of Squarespace Anthony Casalena, Former VP at Twitter Rob Bishop and Ex-CEO of Product Hunt Josh Buckley.

LottieLab – the GIF successor

Founders Andrew Ologunebi and Alistair Thomson met at Entrepreneur First, the startup accelerator program that focuses on talent investment. Both are design and animation experts who have created products used by millions of people globally. From Silicon Valley to Europe, they have also worked at global tech companies like Salesforce and Cisco, and previously managed their own design and software agencies helping multiple fast-growing startups build out cross-platform digital experiences.

The two decided to explore the animation space due to their own frustrations creating high-quality motion-powered digital experiences and the fact that the traditional GIF animation file format was not fit for purpose. As fully-rendered moving images, GIFs take up a lot of space on apps and websites and aren’t interactive in any true sense of the word. Crucially, they cannot be exported as code and as such can’t be manipulated easily by 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 and are used in over 80% of the top 100 apps on the App Store, placing it on a rapid trajectory towards becoming the industry standard. However, working with Lottie animations today still requires the use of Adobe After Effects, a 30-year-old VFX tool with a steep learning curve, not fit for purpose and a patchwork of error-prone plugins.

Enter LottieLab. At its heart, LottieLab is a browser-based end-to-end animation platform, for teams to craft pleasing, intuitive and fun digital experiences. Ologunebi and Thomson have built the easiest tool for Lottie animation workflows from the ground up, solving the problems of existing designers and lowering the barrier of entry to interaction design through an editor that enables you to:

• Create animations with an intuitive tool built just for Lottie meaning compatibility errors and plugin issues are a thing of the past
• Integrate with your existing workflow by instantly importing and edit assets from tools like Figma, Illustrator, After Effects and existing animations from the Lottie marketplace
• Collaborate with your team of designers, developers and product managers on animation assets
• Enables teams to deploy UX animation up to five times faster than other platforms 

Making waves

The investment underlines the excitement behind what LottieLab is offering and the waves the startup has already made in the product design industry. Within just a few months, thousands of users have already signed up for the product’s waitlist including designers and developers from TikTok, Canva, Airbnb, Twitter, Duolingo, Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and more.

The power of high fidelity, fluid and dynamic animations in telling stories that instantly connect with us has been proven with a reported four times increase in user engagement and a 70% increase in conversion rates. But implementing high-quality product animation for websites and apps is a massive resource sink, costing time and money. Often the process requires an expensive developer with graphical programming expertise, and strong illustration and animation skills to code these assets from scratch.

But with LottieLab and the world’s simplest animation editor at its core, users can create, collaborate on, manage and instantly deploy animation assets across their websites and apps significantly faster and easier than before. This allows customers to derive all the benefits of their animations as code, particularly performance and interactivity, without needing to code them. By enabling product teams to manage the entire animation process in a central platform, the value of animation assets only grows enabling smoother collaboration across the animation development and deployment process, regardless of individual skillset.

Endless animation opportunities 

LottieLab is tapping into a potential multi-billion dollar a year opportunity that has so far been somewhat overlooked in the design industry. While Figma has replaced Adobe Illustrator as a collaborative tool for static UX design and Canva has done the same for graphic design, there has been nothing like it for animations. And yet, the serviceable market includes millions of software developers and designers who rely on animations to craft engaging user experiences. By effectively and efficiently saving companies time and money through democratising the animation production process, LottieLab has the potential to become the de-facto animation tool for creatives. 

Despite only launching in July, the LottieLab team has already doubled with recent hires joining primarily through word-of-mouth after hearing about the product through its burgeoning beta community. The reception from users in their discord channel has been impressive, with new use cases emerging every day, from customised clothing for e-commerce retailers through to dynamic content for streamers.

The seed funding will allow LottieLab to grow its team threefold in the next year, with the vast majority of these new hires on the product development side as the team looks to attract the very best talent.

Andrew Ologunebi, CEO of LottieLab, said: “I’m a big fan of sharing funny GIFs with friends, but for high quality product animations, we need a format and tool that’s fit for purpose. With LottieLab, we are decluttering the motion design process and bringing it into the 21st century. LottieLab has all the benefits of modern design tools fit for today’s product development teams; being web-based, collaborative and simple, and crucially, there’s no After Effects qualification needed to use it. This is one of the first steps we are taking towards our mission of democratising motion design for everyone, everywhere and to create a world of storytellers, making the web more fun through animations. I’m over-the-moon that Point Nine and our other investors have decided to join us on this journey.”

Christoph Janz, partner at Point Nine said: “Tools like Figma and Canva have democratized creative design for millions of people, but when it comes to animations, things haven’t changed much in the last decade. We’re thrilled about LottieLab’s vision of democratising motion design and we’re excited to work with them as we drive towards a future of making animations easier for all.”

Harry Stebbings, founder of the 20VC fund said: “The internet in the past has been a source for document-centric, text-heavy, pages of information – an online library. But now it has effectively shifted beyond static documents into a realm of highly interactive and engaging applications. Very soon, any online business that doesn’t offer this level of user experience will be left behind. I’m confident LottieLab will be one of the defining tools of the next five years when it comes to how the web will look and feel. I’m excited to support them on their journey.

Florian Bölter, Product Designer and LottieLab customer at Heygo said: “Having used LottieLab for the past few weeks, I’ve been taken aback by its potential, particularly when it comes to mixing up design workflows. Being able to simply, easily and cost efficiently create production-ready animation assets… It’s a real game-changer. From everything I’ve seen so far, I really believe LottieLab has the potential to become the next must-learn tool for product and UI designers.” 

ENDS

Contact:

Aimee Soulsby / [email protected] 

About LottieLab

Founded in 2021, LottieLab is a browser-based end-to-end animation platform enabling designers and developers to create, collaborate on, manage and instantly deploy Lottie animation assets across their websites and apps multiple times faster than before. This allows LottieLab’s customers to derive all the benefits of their animations as code, particularly performance and interactivity, without writing a single line of code. Although only in its beta-stage, thousands of users have already signed up for the product’s waitlist including designers and developers from TikTok, Canva, Airbnb, Twitter, Duolingo, Google, Uber, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and more.

About Point Nine

Founded in 2011, Point Nine is a European early-stage venture capital firm focused on B2B SaaS and B2B marketplace startups in Europe and North America. The firm is a seed investor in more than 150 companies in  over 30 countries, including Algolia, Brainly, Chainalysis, Clio, Contentful, Delivery Hero, DocPlanner, Front, Loom, Mambu, Revolut, Sqreen, Typeform, and Westwing, amongst others. Point Nine has one of the highest “seed-to-winner” rates of the industry.