Exclusive: Fable Raises $15M Series A For Motion Design Platform

Motion design platform Fable raised $15 million in a Series A round of funding, the company announced Tuesday. 

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Fable started as a research and development project at Gakko, the company Fable founder Chris Boardman previously worked for. The idea was to build interactive kids mobile apps to tell engaging stories without code. During the process, the team realized the people they were working with were illustrators, not animators. They couldn’t unlock their illustrations with motion.

“All this great, powerful software has existed for 30 years, but we realized it’s not accessible, it’s intimidating,” Boardman said in an interview.

Motion is everywhere online, but it’s hard to create if you’re not experienced with tools like Adobe After Effects (the major player for creative software), and tools to create motion graphics are mostly offline, according to Boardman.

Fable’s software exists in a web-based platform to make it collaborative, and its design makes it easy for beginners to use, according to the company. At the heart of it, Fable’s software is for storytelling, per Boardman.

New York-based Fable currently has around 20 employees and will use the funding to speed up production and distribution of its platform.

Redpoint Ventures led the round with participation from Collaborative Fund, SIP Global Partners, Harrison Metal, Third Kind Venture Capital and LightShed Ventures. The Series A round brings Fable’s total funding to $22.4 million. Annie Kadavy of Redpoint will join Fable’s board of directors.

“Motion design is a big and growing workflow challenge—and it’s obvious that winning platforms solve workflow issues,” Kadavy said in an email. “The process of creating motion today requires complicated tools that require extensive training to use, fees to acquire, and reviews and feedback can take hours or even days when you factor in rendering, syncing, and downloading files.  A few years from now I imagine we’ll look back on design from this era and laugh at how static it was for so long.”

The timing is right to roll out Fable’s technology, according to Boardman, because there’s a big gap in the market when it comes to creator tools. 

“Motion is just a big missing piece,” Boardman said. “If we don’t do it, someone else will.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman