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We are excited to share that London-based Electric Sheep, our latest portfolio startup, announces closing an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of $500,000 to accelerate the Visual Effects (VFX) industry with AI technology. The round was backed by AI-focused US VC Dasein Capital with the support of our Look AI Ventures fund and US-based Spatial Capital.
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 annually.
Electric Sheep’s cloud-native solution, Spotlight, is 360x faster, processing 1 second of footage in less than a minute. Steven Sullivan, Partner at Spatial Capital and former Senior Technology Officer of LucasFilm, says: “Electric Sheep’s cutting-edge cloud and AI platform is poised to revolutionize several core VFX workflows. They’re taking a smart and pragmatic approach to accelerate some of the most tedious post-production tasks.”
Electric Sheep’s decision to go cloud-native aligns with MovieLabs — a joint venture research lab run by Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Disney — that advocates for the industry to be entirely cloud-based by 2030.
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. Spotlight is designed for industry workflows by outputting an editable layer that allows VFX artists to make key adjustments, known as splines.
“We are excited to partner with three investors with considerable experience in AI, VFX, and building at scale,” says Gary Palmer, CEO at Electric Sheep. “Flawless background removal negates the need for onset green screens, empowering creatives to capture the energy of the scene without compromising the final image.”
Electric Sheep is streamlining post-production workflows to allow artists to get back to what they do best — telling stories through creative, captivating, and impactful visual effects.
Electric Sheep was launched in 2022 by two school friends, Gary Palmer and Jake Laver, who have been tinkering with projects for the past 6 years, and Richie Murray, whom they met at a pre-seed accelerator in London.
Gary’s expertise gained from working in the film industry, Jake’s fintech background in building secure and scalable systems, and Richie’s experience selling for early-stage tech startups brought together the necessary skills and expertise to successfully found the company and introduce Spotlight to the market.
