Electric Sheep, an AI tech startup in visual effects (VFX), is thrilled to announce the close of an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round of half a million dollars. The round was filled by AI focused VCs, led by Dasein Capital (US), and backed by Spatial Capital (US) and Look AI Ventures (Czech Republic).

Electric Sheep is pioneering a solution to automate flawless background removal for TV and film. This process, known as rotoscoping, is essential before adding special effects. Currently, the only way to deliver the detail needed for the big screen is to manually cut around foregrounds frame-by-frame. This process takes around 6 hours for 1 second of footage and costs the industry over $1.5 billion per year.

Electric Sheep’s cloud-native solution, Spotlight, is 360x faster, processing 1 second of footage in less than a minute. Steven Sullivan, Partner at Spatial Capital and former Senior Technology Officer of LucasFilm said: “Electric Sheep’s cutting-edge cloud and AI platform is poised to revolutionise several core VFX workflows. They’re taking a smart and pragmatic approach to accelerate some of the most tedious post-production tasks.”

Electric Sheep’s decision to go cloud-native aligns with MovieLabs – a joint venture research lab run by Paramount, Sony, Universal and Disney – that advocates for the industry to be fully cloud based by 2030 in their whitepaper.

Electric Sheep will use this capital injection to build and enhance Spotlight, the industry’s first AI rotoscoping tool capable of the detail needed for Hollywood. Spotlight is designed for industry workflows by outputting an editable layer that allows VFX artists to make key adjustments (known as splines).

“We are excited to partner with three investors with considerable experience in AI, VFX, and building at scale.” says Gary Palmer, CEO at Electric Sheep. “Flawless background removal negates the need for onset green screens, empowering creatives to capture the energy of the scene without compromising the final image.”