CHENNAI: Innovation comes after pondering over problems that pester you. When Raghavan RS, founder and CEO of Animaker, a Chennai-based start-up that has a global office in the US, was failing to find an online animation tool capable of delivering studio-quality videos easily, he took the ‘why not’ question seriously — why not create a desired tool by himself. In 2014, when he launched Animaker it was a small team and till Covid times, it continued to remain as a team of not less than 50 members. After the pandemic, the business has grown to a strength of almost 210 members, and with the latest products that were launched last year like Steve.ai and Picmaker, they now create text-to-video and graphic designs in seconds. Raghavan walks us through his journey at Animaker, the products they make, and their future goals.
Starting a start-up
Growing up, Raghavan was interested in science and research. It was when people started noticing his presentations for school and college projects that he understood that his knack for designing. While working in the media creation business, at the start of his career, he found it difficult to use professional software to make simple videos and animation. “I found professional tools like Adobe to be complex. If you wanted to create a simple animation or one set of content, you needed to juggle different tools, processes, and expertise. My thought was to create something simpler like a PowerPoint where anyone can create their videos,” shares Raghavan.
Inspired by successful start-ups, he teamed up with his college friend Loganathan K to build an empire of their own. Even though business was never in their minds, gradually they understood that being an entrepreneur is the best way to fund their business.
Products that promise
With new products being invented after taking reviews from customers, the team promises to make things easier in the Internet world. It satisfies a growing population of content creators, Fortune 500 companies, marketing departments, and the education sector which demands simpler visual content-creating tools. Speaking about the highlight of their collection, Steve.ai, which creates videos within seconds, Raghavan says, “Steve.ai, the patented AI platform works on three different engines — a language processing engine for reading the text and analysing every aspect of it, a design engine that selects the colours, layouts and designs, and the assembling engine which gathers everything and delivers the output to the user. When we started, it took weeks to create a video. AI has narrowed it down to 60-90 seconds. It is getting better every day. Currently, it can create videos up to 12 minutes.” The name Steve in Greek means crown, and Raghavan adds that Steve in a way gives you the power to be the king.
Raghavan describes the company as a soft partner to big teams, as their applications are already integrated with most social media applications like YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and so on. Speaking about the challenges they face, Raghavan comments, “Maintaining a steady growth of customers is the toughest part.” As a professional tool that is built from scratch, Animaker is confident to survive competition from big players like Adobe and Canva. He says, “We took the toughest route to create products that are not dependent on any professional tools. We also have the largest collection of animations. With all these, we have better control and hope to improve our current products’ accuracy while simultaneously creating new ones.” Animaker is a web-based application. To use their products, log into www.animaker.com