Canadian Generative AI Animation Start-Up Viggle AI Raises $19 Million

While much of the animation industry remains deeply concerned about the use of generative AI in the field, tech investors continue to pour money into the burgeoning sector.

Toronto, Canada-based start-up Viggle AI, which is focused on character animation through generative AI, announced today that it has raised $19 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from additional investor Two Small Fish.

Here’s a look at what the company is doing:

• Viggle AI’s value proposition is to simplify the animation process by allowing users to create lifelike animation using text-to-video or image-to-video prompts. It uses the proprietary JST-1 technology, which is a video-3d foundation model that’s built with an understanding of physics, enabling the creation of realistic character movements. An example can be seen below, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker persona replaces video footage of rapper Lil Yachty:
  

  Viggle AI Experiment 💙

  This is an incredible tool for style transfer.

  Details and link to Discord below 👇

  As always, if you enjoy this content please kindly like and share! pic.twitter.com/1qW8H0MuwX

  — A.I.Warper (@AIWarper) April 8, 2024

• The new round of funding will enable Viggle AI to continue to scale, accelerate product development, expand its team, and build its business around controllable video generation and AI animation. The company’s community on Discord currently has four million members.
• The company recently launched the Viggle Creator Program. Members of this program receive a Viggle Pro subscription, an additional 1,000 credits (equivalent to 250 minutes of video), early access to new features, and opportunities to connect with other creators through an exclusive community channel.
• Viggle AI CEO and co-founder Hang Chu, who has previously worked at Autodesk, Facebook, and NVIDIA, said in a statement:
  

  We are excited to welcome a16z and Two Small Fish as partners in our next phase of growth. Their investment not only affirms our vision but also empowers us to redefine the possibilities in AI-driven character animation. As more people seek to integrate AI for a more enjoyable and accessible creative process, Viggle helps seamlessly align consumer demand by combining the best methodologies for building and scaling AI. We look forward to expanding the reach of our technology to an even broader audience and expanding the boundaries of creativity for everyone.

• The company has been using “publicly available” data to train its models, and according to founder Chu, its training dataset includes Youtube videos. The legality of the company’s business model is in question as Youtube’s user terms of service do not allow video harvesting from the platform without permission from the company. Viggle AI disputes that it is doing anything illegal and said in a statement to Techcrunch: “Viggle leverages a variety of public sources, including YouTube, to generate AI content. Our training data has been carefully curated and refined, ensuring compliance with all terms of service throughout the process. We prioritize maintaining strong relationships with platforms like YouTube, and we are committed to respecting their terms by avoiding massive amounts of downloads and any other actions that would involve unauthorized video downloads.”
• Andreessen Horowitz is a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm with over $43 billion in assets under management. The company indicated earlier this year that it was dedicated around $2.25 billion to AI infrastructure and application investments. Justine Moore, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said about this latest investment: “Viggle AI is helping drive a major shift in how content creators approach creation with character and scene consistency. We’ve been impressed with Viggle’s early momentum and the user base it’s already achieved, and we can’t wait to see where their continued innovation will take us.”
• Two Small Fish operating partner and co-founder/ex-CEO of Canadian AI-powered storytelling company Wattpad, Allen Lau added: “Viggle represents the future of content and will upend the entertainment industry much like Wattpad did. As an advisor, I’ll provide guidance that’s rooted in my real-life experience of building a global entertainment platform from the ground up. I’m excited to further disrupt the entertainment industry with Viggle and change how content is created and remixed in the age of generative AI.”