Swedish startup Motorica, a rising force in generative AI for character animation, has secured €5 million in seed funding to scale its AI-powered platform already in use by AAA studios. The round was led by Angular Ventures, with support from Luminar Ventures, to drive expansion and further R&D in high-fidelity, scalable motion synthesis for gaming and virtual production.
Up to 99% Faster Animation Workflows with AAA-Ready Quality
Motorica’s AI-powered animation platform dramatically reduces production times by up to 99%, delivering results 200 times faster than traditional motion capture workflows without compromising on creative control or visual quality.
CEO Willem Demmers emphasized that the goal isn’t to replace animation but to liberate it, enabling artists to focus more on storytelling and performance by automating repetitive tasks. Veteran animator Maxi Keller, known for work on The Last of Us: Part II and Call of Duty: WWII, hailed Motorica’s precision and control as the best tool for locomotion animation available today.
Built for Games, Cinematics, and Virtual Production
Motorica’s AI platform can be easily integrated into the industry standard tools like Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, Maxon Cinema 4D, and Maya which makes it make it easy for artists to operate in an environment that they are accustomed. Motion matching, responsive dynamic characters, and a full range of animation styles whether for real-time gameplay or film are supported.
Motorica offers the ability to generate expressive animations from a small dataset, which offers significant time and cost savings on motion capture and post-production, and enables scalable deployment with large teams and complicated workflows.
Research-Backed, Data-Rich, and Production-Proven
Motorica was founded on the pioneering research of Gustav Henter and Simon Alexanderson, who developed the world’s first deep generative motion synthesis model in 2019. Since then, the team has built a proprietary motion capture studio in Stockholm and amassed one of the most refined motion datasets in the world.
This combination of research depth and production-grade execution positions Motorica as the category leader in AI-based animation.
Growth Plans and Strategic Focus
Motorica will use the latest funding to further expand integrations with leading SDKs and APIs making plug-and-play deployment across animation tools that much easier.
The company will now also grow its motion library to include genre-specific climbing, combating, and stylized animation content and will be cementing key partnerships with game engines and VFX studios. We will be looking to hire mostly in engineering, animation, AI, and customer success to support this rapid scaling.
Putting Artists First
Motorica is dedicated to an artist-first process, so it works closely with animators, developers and technical directors to develop their tools.
The AI manages the iterative nature of mundane tasks such as simple locomotion so that creators can focus on emotional depth, performance and storytelling. “We shifted the traditional 70/30 split,” says CEO Willem Demmers. “Artists spend most of their time creating instead of trouble-shooting.”
Conclusion
With this funding, Motorica is set to reshape how animation is created for games, virtual worlds, and digital humans making lifelike, scalable motion as easy as drag-and-drop.
As generative AI continues to redefine media production, Motorica stands out as a trailblazer, offering a solution that blends speed, realism, and artistic control positioning itself at the forefront of next-gen animation technology.
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