AI Startup Cartwheel, Led By OpenAI And Google Veterans, Raises $10 Million To Simplify 3D Animation

Cartwheel, a new 3D animation company founded by OpenAI scientist Andrew Carr and former Google creative director Jonathan Jarvis, has come out of stealth with a browser-based animation platform designed to dramatically accelerate the creation of character animation for games, films, advertising, and social content. The company also announced a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, bringing its total raised to $15.6 million.

Cartwheel’s tools allow users to generate rigged 3D character animations from text, video, or motion library prompts. The platform supports professional workflows, including exports to Maya and Unreal, but also includes a simplified interface designed to let less technical users build animated scenes and characters directly in the browser. Cartwheel’s technology reduces the time required for common animation tasks from hours or days to minutes, enabling creators to experiment, iterate, and deploy animation assets at production scale.

“There’s this core frustration animators face with today’s software,” Carr told me. “You need huge teams and weeks of effort to do things that should be fast. We wanted to solve that.” Carr previously worked at OpenAI on code generation tools and saw the potential for language models to unlock animation workflows. Jarvis, a designer who helped launch Google Creative Lab and later led the animation-focused studio Universal Pattern. He and Carr started the company together in 2023.

The platform supports text-to-motion generation, motion remixing, and in-browser character rigging. Users can search from a curated library of animations or type prompts such as “cast a wizard spell” or “do a silly dance,” and receive rigged motion sequences that can be applied to custom or generated characters. Animations are fully editable and exportable, and the system is being designed to integrate into industry-standard environments like Unity and Unreal.

Cartwheel’s team includes veterans from Pixar, Riot Games, Sony, and Unity. Animation director Catherine Hicks, whose credits include Coco, Toy Story 3, and Inside Out, has joined as head of animation innovation. Neil Helm, known for leading crowd animation on Inside Out 2, Turning Red, and Up, has been named head of interactive animation. They are helping refine Cartwheel’s tools and rigging systems from an animator’s perspective.

The company’s early access program attracted more than 8,000 beta users, including creatives from DreamWorks, Roblox, Duolingo, and Take-Two. Many of those users, according to Carr, were exploring how Cartwheel could accelerate background and crowd animation, rapid prototyping, or previsualization tasks traditionally bogged down by time and cost. “Animation software hasn’t really changed in 20 years,” Carr said. “There’s no reason the same rigging or blocking task should take three hours every time.”

Cartwheel also includes a character generator trained on licensed 3D assets. Users can upload sketches or models and receive rigged characters in return. The founders were adamant about the importance of training on paid, ethically sourced data, especially as legal scrutiny mounts around AI training practices.

Cartwheel enters a growing field that includes Anything World and Wonder Dynamics. Anything World focuses on auto-rigging and animating 3D assets for game engines like Unity and Unreal, offering a large asset library and developer-friendly tools. Wonder Dynamics, now part of Autodesk, enables filmmakers to insert CG characters into live-action footage without traditional motion capture. All are focused on professional animators working primarily on video games, and background characters in commercial animation.

Cartwheel’s backers include WndrCo, Khosla Ventures, Accel, Tirta, Human Ventures, and Runway, the AI video company. Investors see the technology as applicable beyond media and entertainment, with potential for marketing, education, and e-commerce.

The startup’s next steps include an API, planned for release later this year, that would allow developers to integrate Cartwheel directly into games or other interactive environments. For now, anyone can sign up and begin animating in the browser at getcartwheel.com.

“The tools of storytelling should be in more hands,” said Carr. “That’s what we’re building for.”