The Storyteller Who Rewired Animation
There is a safari story behind Krikey AI. Jhanvi Shriram and her sister Ketaki were in the Okavango Delta in Botswana - cameras in hand, trying to capture something that photographs kept failing to convey. The way a giraffe materializes from acacia trees. The specific hush of that delta at dusk. No image was enough. They'd been thinking about virtual reality, about the gap between experience and record, when the idea crystallized: not a headset, but a phone. Not VR, but AR. Not someday - now.
That Botswana moment launched a company. But what Krikey has become - a generative AI 3D animation platform powering over 100,000 creators - has less to do with safaris and more to do with Jhanvi's years watching creators at YouTube. She was a Production Strategist there, embedded with top creators, seeing what they could build when the tools got out of their way. Animation was never that. Animation was for studios. Animation required specialists, timelines measured in weeks, budgets measured in tens of thousands. She filed that observation away.
The name "Krikey" came from Steve Irwin's signature exclamation - chosen with a certain lightness during incorporation paperwork while traveling through Australia. It stuck. So did the mission.
The industry hasn't been disrupted in decades. We want to empower anyone to animate a 3D character.
- Jhanvi Shriram, Co-Founder & CEO, Krikey AIFrom Tribeca to Generative AI: The Long Way Around
Jhanvi graduated Stanford in 2010 with a B.A. in Political Science and African Studies - about as far from a startup playbook as you can get. She went to USC's Peter Stark Producing Program, one of the most competitive film producing MFAs in the country, and came out the other side having co-produced "True Son," a documentary that tracked a 22-year-old's improbable campaign for Stockton City Council. The film premiered at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival and was acquired by FusionTV/Univision. Not bad for a first production.
But film kept bumping into a wall. The tools for storytelling were slow, expensive, and gatekept. She felt this at Participant Media. She felt it at JauntVR, where immersive storytelling was real but hardware costs kept it in a lab. At YouTube, working alongside creators who had audiences in the millions but no way to make the animated content they imagined, she saw the gap most clearly.
Jhanvi returned to Stanford for her MBA in 2015. Her sister Ketaki was finishing a PhD at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab - studying how VR generates empathy, how avatars shape behavior. In December 2016, both degrees in hand, they founded Krikey. "It was a stroke of luck that we ended up down such varied paths and were able to bring our skill sets back together," Jhanvi said. A businessperson who understood storytelling. A technologist who understood the psychology of virtual presence. Two different entry points into the same problem.
The Canva Moment
Krikey launched on Canva's Apps Marketplace and saw traffic surge 23x in a single day. The integration gave access to 170M+ monthly Canva users - and unlocked an entirely new market: teachers building animated lesson plans, students making presentations come alive, marketers cutting video production timelines from two weeks to five minutes.
AR Gaming to AI Animation: When to Burn the Boat
Krikey started as a mobile AR gaming company. The first version was a multiplayer augmented reality game - basketball, golf, a Chinese New Year pig race - playable through your phone camera. By 2020, the app had reached Google Play's Top 25. Reliance Jio, India's largest telecom operator, led the Series A. Sony Pictures licensed the Goosebumps IP. Ellen DeGeneres's wildlife foundation co-developed a game. The company had momentum.
Then generative AI changed the math. The question wasn't whether to pivot - it was how fast. Jhanvi and Ketaki read the same signals every founder in SF was reading in 2022-2023, but they had something most didn't: a technical moat in motion data. Using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, they labeled massive motion-capture datasets in 3 months rather than 12, saving over $200,000 in the process. That became the training foundation for their text-to-animation model.
The result: Krikey AI. Type a prompt. Upload a video. Get a fully animated 3D character - lip-synced in 20+ languages via a partnership with ElevenLabs - in under five minutes. No animation background required. No downloads. Browser-based. The mission statement is almost annoyingly clean: make professional animation as easy as typing.
The $200,000 Data Advantage
By using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to label motion capture datasets, Krikey AI completed in 3 months what would have taken a year through traditional methods - saving over $200,000 in data labeling costs. That dataset became the foundation of their text-to-animation AI model. The unglamorous infrastructure work was the moat.
What She's Built
What Jhanvi Says
"AR will be as powerful to the next generation of young creators as YouTube was in 2006."
- Jhanvi Shriram"The only place we can get these types of user findings is Canva where we actually have real, motivated, intentional users coming to try out the product."
- Jhanvi Shriram, on the Canva partnership"The viewer is the creator, weaving their story on camera."
- Jhanvi Shriram"Finding good people - who also believe female founders can succeed! - is hard."
- Jhanvi Shriram, on recruiting"It was a stroke of luck that we ended up down such varied paths and were able to bring our skill sets back together."
- Jhanvi Shriram, on co-founding Krikey with Ketaki"Our vision with Krikey is to bring together inspiration and reality in an immersive way. With AR, we are able to bring fantasy worlds into your home, straight through the window of your mobile phone."
- Jhanvi & Ketaki Shriram