Cheehoo is an AI-powered animation company that emerged from Rideback, the production company behind franchises like The Lego Movie, with a mission to compress the cost and timeline of animated content creation. Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for animators, Cheehoo frames its technology as a creative accelerator that lets studios and individual creators move from idea to animated output far more quickly than traditional pipelines allow.
The company's founding team is a deliberate blend of entertainment and technology talent. It includes Rideback co-founder Dan Lin and co-CEOs Michael LoFaso and Jonathan Eirich, alongside former DreamWorks Animation president Chris deFaria and ex-Apple AI researchers Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai and Wei-Cheng Kuo. This combination reflects Cheehoo's belief that winning in AI animation requires both deep production knowledge and frontier machine learning capability.
Cheehoo raised $10 million in funding co-led by Greycroft and Point72 Ventures, with participation from Basis Set, Headline Asia, Powerhouse Capital, Playground Productions, and Rideback itself. The capital supports development of its animation tooling and expansion of its engineering and creative teams as it works toward a platform that studios and creators can adopt at scale.
The broader opportunity Cheehoo is chasing is significant: animation has historically been one of the most labor-intensive and expensive forms of content production, with timelines stretching across years and budgets running into the tens of millions. By applying generative AI to stages of the animation workflow, Cheehoo aims to democratize a medium that has been gated by cost and specialized labor, enabling a wider range of creators to produce high-quality animated stories. Its Hollywood pedigree gives it credibility with studios while its AI research roots position it to build differentiated technology.