LottieFiles co-founder Kshitij Minglani (R) and Nattu Adnan
LottieFiles, an open source animation file format that is tiny, interactive and can be manipulated at runtime, has raised US$9 million in a Series A financing.
The round was led by M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, with participation from existing investor 500 Startups.
According to a press release, the new capital will be used to further its product roadmap, increase user base and expand its infrastructure.
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Launched in 2018, LottieFiles is a community platform for designers and developers, who create motion graphics using the Lottie file format. A JSON-based animation file format, Lottie enables designers to ship animations on any platform as easily as shipping static assets. They are small files that work on any device and can scale up or down without pixelation.
A Lottie animation can play your animation on web or mobile devices while still maintaining “high quality”. It can also have smart settings that can allow for your animation to be interactive.
According to the company, the size of a Lottie file significantly increases download speed and reduces the amount of disk space utilised.
Its cross-platform capabilities also save designers and developers time by freeing them from having to code motion graphics for different platforms individually.
“By listening to the Lottie community, we have created a unique set of editing, workflow and collaboration tools that seamlessly integrate with popular design software and developer environments such as Adobe After Effects, Figma, VS Code and others,” Nattu Adnan, co-founder of LottieFiles, said.
“To make things easier for non-motion designers, users can take advantage of tons of free content available on our platform to get started,” he added.
On average, a new Lottie file is uploaded to the platform every 15 seconds, the company claimed. These assets range from simple animated icons to animated product onboarding and walkthroughs, system animations on smartwatches, interactive infographics for online publications, and many other use cases across devices.
With offices in San Francisco and Malaysia, the startup claims to have surpassed one million users from over 65,000 companies globally, including Google, TikTok, Disney, Uber, Airbnb, and Netflix.
While the company is growing at a significant rate, the co-founders have not monetised the platform yet but plan to do so later this year.
In a world dominated by Reels and TikTok, animated video content is slowly growing more popular than it was ever before.
Cisco said in a report that by 2020, online videos will make up for over 80 per cent of all consumer internet traffic.
As more and more content creators hop on the TikTok trend, this gives LottieFiles a huge market to offer its services to.
Abhi Kumar, Partner at M12, said that LottieFiles empowers an entirely new set of users by unlocking new opportunities to use motion graphics for their video content.
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Image Credit: LottieFiles
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