Motorica Raises $5.4 Million To Replace Mocap With Generative AI

Forbes

6 days ago

Every action a character can take must be animated beforehand.
Motion capture has long been one of the most expensive and labor-intensive parts of AAA game development. From booking studio time to cleaning data, the process can take weeks and cost studios tens of millions of dollars for a AAA game. A Stockholm-based startup, Motorica, wants to change that. Emerging from stealth today with €5 million ($5.4 million) in seed funding, the company offers a generative AI platform that dramatically accelerates character animation, allowing studios to bypass traditional mocap without sacrificing quality or control.
Founder Willem Demmers.
'Studios today spend millions creating realistic animation—and still often only fully animate one character,' said CEO Willem Demmers. 'With our tech, they can animate a hundred.' Demmers, a serial founder in creative tech, partnered with generative AI researcher Gustav Henter and mocap veteran Simon Alexanderson to bring the company's 2019 research prototype to market.
The result is what Motorica calls 'motion synthesis': a transformer-based AI model trained on thousands of hours of proprietary motion capture, capable of generating high-fidelity character animation at scale. According to the company, studios using the platform have reported animation workflows running up to 200 times faster than traditional mocap pipelines, with cost reductions exceeding 90 percent.
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David Peterson, partner at Angular Ventures, which led the round, said, 'We invested in Motorica because they're building foundational technology for the next wave of digital experiences—from games and virtual worlds to robotics and XR. Their platform solves a massive production bottleneck.'
That bottleneck is well known in the industry. Red Dead Redemption 2 reportedly required more than 300,000 unique animations and cost an estimated $300 million to develop. Developers commonly cite animation as one of the most time-consuming and expensive parts of production. For large open-world games, animation alone can represent 10 to 30 percent of the total budget.
Mocap the old fashioned way.
Veteran animator Maxi Keller, whose credits include The Last of Us Part II and Call of Duty: WWII, called Motorica 'the best tool out there for locomotion and motion matching.' He emphasized the platform's ability to give creators precise control over speed, acceleration, and expressive nuance, key requirements in gameplay animation.
Demmers is careful to position the tool as augmentative rather than disruptive. 'We're not replacing animators or actors,' he said. 'We're replacing their chores.' According to the company, traditional workflows allocate 70 percent of animation time to technical tasks like keyframing and filler cycles. Motorica flips that ratio, allowing artists to focus on narrative, character, and creative polish.
The funding round includes participation from Luminar Ventures and angel investors in the gaming space, including founders of major Swedish studios Avalon and Fatshark. The company, which now has 21 employees—over half of them AI researchers—plans to expand rapidly. Roadmap priorities include SDKs for deeper engine integration, new datasets for stylized and non-humanoid motion, and strategic partnerships with virtual production studios and simulation platforms.