Krikey AI is empowering storytellers with accessible AI-driven 3D animation

Everyone has stories worth telling, but we’re not all blessed with the technical know-how to bring them to life. In the 3D animation world, creative expression relies on a deep understanding of complex software and technical concepts that few possess. For many of us, scripting is Shakespeare’s domain, modelling belongs on catwalks, and rigging is something that should only be discussed by those with a parrot on their shoulder. But things are changing—fast.

Generative AI presents an opportunity to break through technical ceilings that have historically limited creativity. Krikey AI is a radical startup that has seized that opportunity with both hands. The company was founded by two sisters with a shared creative spark and an appetite to shake things up at industry scale. What started out as a gaming company has rapidly snowballed into an innovative 3D animation service that is democratizing access to 3D animation for consumers and businesses.

The Krikey team are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology to not only open doors for new creatives, but take them off at the hinges. Having successfully completed the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, Krikey AI has also captured new opportunities that would have initially seemed out of reach. That includes closely collaborating with AWS experts and product teams, launching new enterprise offerings, and partnering with industry giants like Canva.

Successful game developers turned AI innovators

Krikey AI was founded in 2017 by sisters Dr. Ketaki Shriram and Jhanvi Shriram. After graduating from their MBA and PhD programs, the siblings applied for jobs in the tech industry with the hope of working on the same team or project. It was this desire to work together that ultimately inspired the pair to launch a gaming company, which specialized in mobile and augmented reality titles. “We produced many indie games and had a lot of success with them on iOS and Android app stores,” says Ketaki.

She continues, “One of the biggest challenges for us was producing animations as quickly as possible.” This placed a lot of pressure on what was a very small team. Slick promotional animations were a necessity but with limited resources prolonged production cycles became common. While working to tackle this issue, an idea began to take shape. “We started to think, what if we could build the first ever collaborative, web-based 3D content video editor, so that anyone on our team could not only generate animations, but also turn them into high quality 3D content?” And so Krikey AI was born, with Jhanvi as CEO and Ketaki as CTO.

Animating a static industry

Traditional 3D animation workflows are time-consuming and inaccessible to those without a high level of technical knowledge. Krikey AI challenges that status quo, “Historically, animation has been a completely manually driven process, and it usually takes about seven to ten business days to generate one animation,” says Ketaki. “It's really limited to people who are very technically skilled and have spent years training. 3D content is almost exclusively designed for very high-end experiences—we wanted to bring AI animation to everyone.”

Jhanvi adds: “The industry hasn't been disrupted in decades. We want to empower anyone to animate a talking 3D character, while also enabling large enterprises to accelerate their time to production. We want to empower diverse storytellers to enter the 3D animation space without a technical barrier to entry.”

Generative AI enables Krikey AI to swap steep learning curves for intuitive and accessible tools that promote their users’ creativity. Ketaki explains: “You can enter a text prompt or upload a video, and we will turn it into a high-quality 3D animation in a matter of minutes. You can use our no code web-based editor to customize your avatar and have it lip sync dialogue in more than 20 languages, complete with facial expressions, hand gestures, and text effects. When your product is ready, you can export it either as an MP4 video file or FBX file into your current creative workflow.”

For the consumer and the enterprise

Krikey AI democratizes 3D animation and delivers value to both casual and professional users alike. “There have been so many customers using Krikey AI in ways that we never even imagined when we created our product,” says Ketaki. “One story I like to share is a professor of dance who has taken videos of themselves dancing, and used Krikey AI to turn those into high quality 3D animations and animated lesson plans that can be shared with students, especially if they're learning remotely.”

“On the enterprise side,” says Jhanvi, “we're enabling larger customers to accelerate time to market and lower costs. We do this by shortening the time it takes to produce animated content at scale. Previously, it might have taken up to two weeks to create a single animation. Now in less than 5 minutes, we can get a base version of that animation which an animator or a game developer can then polish in less than an hour.”

Krikey AI currently has two enterprise offerings. The first enables organizations to bulk license its no code 3D editor and provision it for their teams. Ketaki explains: “if your team wants to collaborate on creating training videos for example, you can provision licenses for Krikey through the AWS Marketplace or directly off our website.” The second is an upcoming video-to-animation offering. “This will enable businesses with large video archives to upload thousands of hours of video footage which are then animated by Krikey AI and returned directly to their AWS billing instance.”

The technology behind the magic

Krikey AI is powered by AWS. “We use a wide variety of services to power all the different parts of our tool,” says Ketaki. That includes Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for building, training, and deploying AI models. The Krikey AI team used SageMaker to manage the company’s foundation model, handling everything from inference to labelling.

As with any AI product, data security is critical. SageMaker helps Krikey AI to keep their own proprietary models and customer data private. “We don't actually see the customer's data,” says Ketaki. “It's deployed directly into their AWS billing instance and our foundation model is also protected because it's just a SageMaker endpoint. So… we don't have to share data in either direction.”

The team also built their web-based 3D editor on AWS Amplify, a set of tools for building full-stack applications for web and mobile, which itself runs on top of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage. “The animation outputs are pretty large files,” says Ketaki. “If we couldn’t store them in the cloud, it would be pretty hard to run our product at all.”

Early-stage acceleration

A fundamental catalyst for Krikey AI’s growth was enrolling in the AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, a 10-week hybrid program supporting generative AI startups with ideas that make us reimagine what’s possible. The Accelerator program provides access to up to US$100,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, proof of concept opportunities, as well as a seasoned network of experts, AWS Partners, investors, and more.

Ketaki explains, “we had been building on AWS for a while. But we're a small company of less than 20 people. We never imagined that we would meet anyone who actually worked at AWS. We loved building on the cloud. It empowered us so much, and when we saw that there was a generative AI program for startups, we thought we may as well go ahead and throw our hat in the ring.”

After being accepted to the program, the Krikey AI team was assigned a dedicated AWS account manager. “That was incredibly meaningful for us,” says Ketaki. “We had never had that experience before where there was someone at a large organization like AWS who cared enough about our company to reach out to us and support us on our startup journey, not just for ten weeks but also beyond the Accelerator program.”

Jhanvi explains, “The Accelerator program provided us with so many resources we would never have had access to otherwise, including technical guidance as we've been building out our AI foundation models, and sales and marketing support,” says Jhanvi. “We don't have a sales team—we don’t really have a large marketing team—so having access to that expertise as we go to market has really enabled us to grow much faster than we would have on our own.”

Promotional Credits awarded through the Accelerator program also enabled Krikey AI to offset some of the computing costs associated with training their foundation model, which in turn freed up funds to invest in growing the team. Previously, quality assurance duties had been a shared responsibility across the team on top of their usual day-to-day workloads. “We were able to hire a QA team,” says Ketaki, “which has helped us grow our subscriber base and improve the quality of our product.”

Non-stop support enables new opportunities

“We learned so much during the Accelerator program. But what has really made it stand out is the engagement long after the program ended,” says Jhanvi. “As a company, we've been a part of six different startup accelerators, and AWS has by far been the best in terms of their actual commitment and dedication to ensuring startup success beyond the program itself.”

Ketaki adds: “after the Accelerator program, we've been fortunate to partner and work with so many teams across AWS.” That includes the SageMaker team, who helped to train Krikey’s AI video-to-animation foundation model. “Before we met their team, we had actually been manually labelling thousands of training data samples ourselves,” says Ketaki. “Every hour that we spent manually labeling data was one less hour that we could spend focusing on our product and customer experience.”

The SageMaker team worked together with Krikey to pilot a novel way of labelling animation and video data for foundation model training. “With their help, we were able to accelerate time to market by more than three months and saved ourselves thousands of hours of manually labeling our own content,” says Ketaki.

She continues: “SageMaker has been very valuable for us as a small team training our own foundation model, which is a huge undertaking. We've been able to reduce our costs significantly, and it’s really helped us to further the enterprise side of our offering. In fact, I would actually say that without the support of the team, we probably wouldn’t have an enterprise offering today.”

Jhanvi adds: “when we first started working with AWS, we were really focused on just our consumer product, but they worked very closely with us to develop the product feature set that would be most valuable to enterprise customers.”

Canva partnership boosts traffic by 23x

A key part of the AWS Accelerator program is about helping startups identify and capture new growth opportunities—often those they may not have thought possible previously. Jhanvi explains: “As a female founded startup, often when we do go to pitch, we aren’t taken as seriously. It has nothing to do with how articulate we are or the quality of what we are selling. It has to do with societal norms. Having AWS in the room with us has empowered us to achieve the vision we have for our own product.”

Securing a partnership with Canva is just one example of how AWS mentorship has helped Krikey AI win a seat at the table with larger enterprises. Ketaki explains: “we were assigned an AWS mentor as part of the Accelerator program, and ours just happened to be based in the APAC region, and they were able to connect us with Canva.”

At the time, Canva was actively looking for AI partners, and Krikey AI’s AWS mentor recognized the potential opportunities in connecting the two companies. “We discussed how we could bring 3D animated talking avatars to their 2D design tool for the first time. That integration went live at the end of 2023 and the day we launched our traffic grew 23x overnight.”

The story continues, frame by frame

Going forward, the Krikey AI team continues to make 3D animation accessible for consumers and businesses. “We have the opportunity to change the animation industry by empowering anybody to animate. We want to empower more diverse storytellers and help them bring their ideas to market,” says Jhanvi. “We are on the edge of a revolution where artists, animators, creators, and game developers can plug generative AI into their existing creative workflows and accelerate time to market.”

AWS technology, programs, and expertise have enabled the Krikey AI team to not only reimagine what’s possible with 3D animation, but also what’s possible for their business. The team are currently working towards releasing their second enterprise offering, all while collaborating with AWS to grow their customer base even further. “We greatly value the relationships we have within AWS,” says Jhanvi. “Every person we meet is a relationship that leads us to a new opportunity. None of what we do today would be possible without AWS.”