Romanian avatar based animation firm FaceRig, which is part of the Holotech Studios SRL software company announced to secured 1.7 million euros to further develop their product and enforce the sale worldwide, tech.eu reported. The investment is made by the American SignalFire venture capital fund founded in 2013 in San Francisco, California.
“FaceRig represents a paradigm shift in visual messaging, facilitating expressiveness through avatars for anyone with a simple push of a button,” said Wayne Hu principal at the investment fund SignalFire.
Reportedly, FaceRig will use the money to further develop SDK multi-platform type solution and an avatar e-shop, both scheduled to be released in 2018.
“Using motion capture applied to data coming from a cell phone camera, or from a webcam, the platform handles everything that means interpreting the motion, generating synthesis images, so content creators just need to Focus on creating attractive animated characters. We trust FaceRig to be a roadrunner capable of creating a new standard in avatar-based interaction and we are delighted to be partners with them to accelerate rapid adoption of the standard by artists, marketing agencies, creative studios and consumers”, the SignaFire founder, Chris Farmer explains, startupcafe.ro reported.
Founded in 2013 in Bucharest, Romania, Holotech Studios SRL is a company developed by 6 Romanians following their crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, where they managed to raise approximately 271,000 euros. Their flagship application FaceRig is a software that allows anyone to embody and animate outstanding real-time CG (computer generated) character portraits via motion capture from a webcam stream or via direct puppeteering controls.
It is meant to become a cross-platform, open, accessible real-time digital actor framework for home or business use.
The program was launched on the Steam digital distribution service on 7th of July 2015.
To date, according to their LinkedIn profile, the application has more than 4 million downloads worldwide, with 2,5 million downloads on mobile devices alone.
The application can be used for both personal and commercial purposes. So far it has been used for Skype conversations, museum visits, corporate events, tech exhibitions, education, theater and more.
As a support to their further global growth, besides their offices in Bucharest, they’ve opened an office in San Francisco as well.