After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Paton’s AiMation Studios released ">Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minute—totaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as “soulless and uninspired,” it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets.
But it’s not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs.
The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform.
Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platform’s AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blender—without disrupting their pipeline.
The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPT’s code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns.
The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarvis’s concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible.
“I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldn’t yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to ‘talk’ to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code,” says Jarvis. “We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.”
After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million.
Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheel’s wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform.
“All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, we’ve employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines,” Carr says. “Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.”
A Creator-First AI Animation Tool
While the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity.
“Animators and creatives don’t care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done,” Jarvis says. “Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they can’t do everything. That’s why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but it’s the artist who brings the soul.”
A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine “Cat” Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2.
The platform’s design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unity’s real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films.
“We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful,” Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. “Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox—all animation-driven experiences. We’re building tools for where animation is headed, and that’s resonating with industry veterans.”
User feedback has helped shape Cartwheel’s interface.
“We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while that’s compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselves—so we’ve moved to a multimodal interface,” Carr says.
What’s Next for Cartwheel?
High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic data—AI-generated animations that mimic real-world motion—to train and refine its models.
“The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. That’s where the value is,” Carr says. “While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce the styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.”
With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets.
“Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish,” Jarvis says. “Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.”
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