Tech
This a16z-backed startup wants to make it easier for designers to create interactive, animated graphics. Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck Rive used to raise $10 million from Two Sigma Ventures.
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- Rive offers designers and developers a tool to create animated, interactive graphics.
- Brothers Guido and Luigi Rosso cofounded the graphic design startup in 2016.
- The a16z-backed startup raised $10 million in funding from Two Sigma Ventures.
In high school, twin brothers Guido and Luigi Rosso each competed in a contest to design the logo for MP3 player company Diamond Multimedia. Luigi pored over the task for a week straight, while Guido haphazardly pulled together his logo in the hour before the deadline.
Then the results came in: Guido won first place, Luigi took third.
Since then, Guido Rosso told Insider, the two decided to run companies together, with Guido leveraging his designing talents and Luigi heading up engineering.
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The twins’ experience in design led them to cofound in 2016, Rive, a tool that helps users create animated, interactive graphics. In January 2022, the startup landed $10 million in Series A funding, led by Two Sigma Ventures. This followed a $4 million seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Unusual Ventures, in December 2019.
Currently, design processes are inefficient, with engineers forced to rebuild mockups that designers create in tools like Figma, Guido Rosso told Insider. Some existing products, like website builder Framer, combine the designing and building workflows but are limited to one specific destination, like web or mobile, he added.
The Rosso brothers built Rive to be an end-to-end platform for designers, allowing them to create ready-to-use animated graphics without the use of complicated code.
For example, Rive’s State Machine defines different phases of animations as “states” that can be connected with transitions.
This technology is what edtech startup Duolingo used to animate their in-app characters speaking in 40-plus languages. With Rive, Duolingo designers were able to define the different mouth positions for each sound as “states” and automatically connect and replicate them for all the characters, versus having to separately animate the movements of each character using custom code.
Currently, Rive’s customers are concentrated in edtech and fintech, with some larger users like Google and Samsung, Rosso said. Although these customers, mostly developers and designers, tend to leverage Rive for somewhat narrow use cases like creating in-app animated graphics, Rosso hopes that Rive’s tools can some day be used by anyone to build graphics that run in software.
To that point, Rive also offers open-source libraries to load and run Rive graphics across a variety of destinations, including apps, games, and websites.
Following its Series A round, the startup plans to polish its go-to-market strategy, by raising awareness around the product’s ability to replace more expensive alternatives that require larger file sizes, and continue building out its team, Rosso told Insider.
Here’s an exclusive look at the 10-slide pitch deck Rive used to raise $10 million in Series A funding from Two Sigma Ventures:
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