Ziva Dynamics announced a $7 million seed round led by Grishin Robotics, Toyota AI Ventures, and Millennium Technology Value Partners’ New Horizons Fund.
The company will use the money to make key hires, advance development on Ziva’s real-time digital character engine, and expand the company’s sales and marketing capabilities.
Ziva’s character authoring tool has been used by over 100 studios on numerous projects including Game of Thrones, The Meg, and Captain Marvel. The toolkit helps studios create CG characters with dynamic muscles, fat, and skin that automatically flex, wrinkle, and jiggle in a realistic way.
"The video game industry is set to reach over $300 billion by 2025 and console games, the fastest-growing game category, made over $47.9 billion in 2019 alone. We’re proud to be delivering on major titles for next-gen console games already," said James Jacobs and Jernej Barbic, co-founders of Ziva Dynamics. "Our biomechanics, soft tissue and machine learning technologies are finally intersecting with the optimization of game consoles, enabling us to introduce the highest quality characters to a space that is constantly pushing for better, faster results."
The toolkit helps studios create CG characters with dynamic muscles, fat, and skin that automatically flex, wrinkle, and jiggle in a realistic way.
"James and Jernej are making a big impact on the film industry with their cutting-edge 3D character technology," said Dmitry Grishin, founding partner at Grishin Robotics. "We are big believers in the convergence of film, animation and online gaming content and are very excited to partner with Ziva in building industry-standard character creation software for the rapidly growing digital entertainment universe."
You can learn more about the company's projects here.