London’s Electric Sheep bags €460K to revolutionise VFX with AI

London-based Electric Sheep, an AI tech startup that specialises in visual effects (VFX), announced that it has raised $500K (€460K) in a pre-seed funding round led by US-based Dasein Capital.

US venture capital firm Spatial Capital and Look AI Ventures from the Czech Republic also participated in the round.

The company says it will use the funding to enhance its cloud-based solution, Spotlight. The company claims Spotlights is the first AI rotoscoping tool to meet Hollywood-level details and cater to industry needs.

“Spotlight” creates an editable layer for VFX artists to make adjustments using splines. It can process one second of footage in less than a minute, which is 360 times faster.

Gary Palmer, CEO of Electric Sheep, says, “We are excited to partner with three investors with considerable experience in AI, VFX, and building at scale.” 

“Flawless background removal negates the need for onset green screens, empowering creatives to capture the energy of the scene without compromising the final image,” says Palmer.

Revolutionising VFX workflows

Established in 2022, the team behind Electric Sheep has accumulated years of hands-on experience in camera-to-post production workflows for prominent names, including Netflix, Amazon, and Disney.

Electric Sheep’s primary objective is to provide an automated solution for seamless background removal in television and film. This process, called rotoscoping, is necessary before adding special effects.

“Electric Sheep’s cutting-edge cloud and AI platform is poised to revolutionise several core VFX workflows,” says Steven Sullivan, partner at Spatial Capital and former senior technology officer of LucasFilm.

“They’re taking a smart and pragmatic approach to accelerate some of the most tedious post-production tasks.”

Currently, the sole method to achieve the required level of detail for cinematic presentations is by manually outlining foreground elements frame by frame. This takes about six hours for just one second of footage, resulting in an annual industry expenditure exceeding $1.5 billion.

Recognising the hurdles within the realm of VFX, Electric Sheep discerns a promising avenue to address these challenges by harnessing the potential of emerging AI technology.