Our Seed Investment in Cartwheel: Making 3D Animation More Accessible

Today we’re announcing our partnership with Cartwheel, the motion company.

When Pixar's Toy Story hit the screens in 1995, it set a new bar for animation. In the two decades since then, there have been mostly incremental changes in the industry. That’s about to change with Cartwheel. 

Cartwheel’s text-to-animation platform allows creatives to animate 3D characters for games, movies, ads, apps, social media, or VR. It is super user-friendly, too – you can easily tweak animations either in the browser-based app or in your preferred 3D editing program.

At the heart of Cartwheel’s platform is AI. While some industries face hurdles in adopting AI due to its tendency for "hallucinations," in creative areas such as animation, many of these unexpected and creative results can be additive.

Cartwheel will make 3D animation more accessible than ever before. What used to take a day now takes seconds, accelerating the process up to 100x, giving artists more time to explore and create. This means more people can tell incredible stories through animation, and professional animators can take on even bigger and more ambitious projects. 

Cartwheel has the perfect founding team for the task at hand: Jonathan Jarvis and Andrew Carr. Their combined backgrounds in engineering and creative roles at places like Google, OpenAI, and a few startups give them the perfect mix of skills to build the platform the animation industry has been waiting for. 

We’re thrilled to support the journey. Welcome to the Accel Family.

- Dan Levine