We are pleased to announce our $37 million Series B funding round, led by Square Peg Capital, XYZ Venture Capital, Great Point Ventures and existing investors, 500 Startups and M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund.
Back in 2017, LottieFiles started as our weekend project; to keep us mentally stimulated and come together as a group of friends who would always show up at our favorite cafe Saturday evenings. It is surreal even to think that it's a 115+ employee company and a large community of over 3 million users from 135,000+ companies worldwide who use LottieFiles today to ship Motion.
We are immensely grateful to the entire Lottie Design and Developer community, the LottieFiles team, and our investors and partners like Adobe, Figma, Webflow, and WordPress. We Lottie You :)
We look at funding as a responsibility and a reminder to keep our heads down, to add immense value to our users, and come together as a team to create a legacy. Our vision is to enable Motion on every website, every app, and digital screen on the planet.
A huge credit to Hernan Torrisi, who conceived the idea of exporting the representation of an animation Adobe After Effects, rendering the animation at Run time, and releasing a renderer for the format with a Javascript-based player for the web. Hernan, you had the brilliance & the fore-sight to open-source it.
Immense gratitude to the Engineers Brandon Withrow, Gabriel Peal, and Leland Richardson who were at Airbnb at the time and saw the potential that JSON based animations presented and the problems it solved and partnered with the lead animator Salih Abdul-Karim at Airbnb to help build iOS and Android libraries that could render these JSON animation files, which they called “Lottie”.
It's been fun to come to work each day over the last four and a half years, come together as a team and wake up with one objective: to create a legacy in the Design space. We often say, "Argh!! Motion is hard," and then find ourselves right back at work. So many projects take a back seat, then get entirely re-written and dusted repeatedly. We at LottieFiles are just getting started and feel we are barely scratching the surface of the endless possibilities with Lottie animations.
To the entire LottieFiles team, I salute you for your patience and dedication to making it through this thus far in an ever-so-changing environment where on-the-go processes and uncertainty are a theme of the week. Real proud of the work we do here and the memories we have built along the way. Cheers to many more.
Rest assured, we will continue to run like its DAY 1.
Our Plans for 2022
Simplified workflow and collaboration
We have further simplified the motion workflow for designers and design teams. It encapsulates all our learnings over the past years and addresses pain points for both designers and developers.
Millions of animations go through LottieFiles workflow, tooling, plugins, and integrations, and our team got together with small, medium, and large teams and perfected the motion methodology. The new motion workflow lets designers and teams manage and organize Projects, team files, stakeholder feedback, and add private collections, all in one place. In addition, we have enabled the easiest Developer handoff and have also introduced the ability to optimize the Lottie file size by 8X (yup, you heard that right).
Some selected teams from our 135,000+ companies have already received early beta access to this workflow, and many of you will see changes to your LottieFiles account by June 2022.
We know that this will allow even non-motion designers to play and ship Motion with ease.
Taking Lottie to the real-world use cases
LottieFiles now has powerful & Plugins integrations with Adobe After Effects (that lets you export and preview a Lottie just a click), Adobe XD, Figma, (you can easily take your Lottie to your Design prototypes) with Framer X, Prototpie, Cavalry and more.
We have new versions to these plugins coming this Quarter and many more integrations in the works. You can follow the latest integrations here.
Digital asset library
Our digital asset library now packs over 4.3+ million design assets (Icons, Illustrations, 3D, LottieFiles). These highly customizable assets come with an intuitive Editor and a color palette that lets you add your brand colors with just a click. You can explore our digital asset library at Iconscout.
Each week we add over 30,000+ new assets to our asset library. We understand that it's these assets that make designs come alive. We aim to be the largest go-to source for highly relevant and customizable assets, be it 3D, Illustrations, or motion graphics.
Community and education
We are obsessed with learning with our designer and developer community and their use cases of Lottie. Our in-house education team creates a tutorial video every week (less than 5 mins) and shares it here.
Our evangelist and community team and moderators (from over 13 countries) host events, online webinars, and in-person gatherings with local designers, developers, and marketers passionate about design and Motion. Watch for future events from our community team.
Thank you again to the Lottie Design and Developer community; we appreciate you rooting for us and spreading the word. As a result, more designers have started to take advantage of Motion across their designs, apps, web, and social.
We Lottie You ❤️
Kshitij (K) & Nattu
