Superplastic, Amazon Sign ‘Janky & Guggimon’ Deal For Show, Fund Raise

February 15 7 am

Vermont-based Superplastic – the digital studio behind “synthetic celebrities” Janky and Guggimon – has signed a multi-part deal with AmazonAMZN
that brings its digital characters to an animated series in development with Amazon Studios, a first-look arrangement for additional projects, and a $20 million Series A-4 funding raise led by Amazon’s venture arm.

“What we got is they’re helping us make shows, and gave us a first-look” deal, said Superplastic founder and CEO Paul Budnitz from the company’s Burlington, Vt., offices. “They invested a little, then did a TV deal, then invested more, then called up and said we’d like to do a first look. I said, ‘Great, more money to do weird stuff with.’”

The Janky & Guggimon Show, built around the comically incompetent digital buddies, is in development, with writing continuing for a still-undetermined number of episodes, Budnitz said. The show would feature not only the two digital stars but other Superplastic characters and celebrity human guests.

Amazon will have first dibs on the show and other projects featuring Superplastic’s growing menagerie of digital characters. And Superplastic will also receive another round of investment capital that Budnitz said will be used for a variety of projects across various platforms.

The $20 million fund-raising round was led by the Amazon Alexa Fund, a corporate venture-capital unit of Amazon focused on new media, smart consumer electronics, ambient intelligence, and other consumer-facing technologies, Director Paul Bernard said. The Alexa fund previously had made a “meaningful” investment in an earlier Superplastic fundraising round.

“We have this thesis about the potential for software to define the next set of superstars,” Bernard said. “They can meet the audience where they are. They can be refined based on attributes, and what people say they are. It turns out that’s what Paul Budnitz was doing, using the best version of traditional tools. The early evidence is that they’ve found a sizable audience with a demographic of young adults that’s hard to reach, hard to get sticky with, and also really important to Amazon.”

The round also includes investments from an array of notable international VCs, including Craft Ventures, Google Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Kering, Sony Japan, Scribble Ventures, Kakao, Animoca Brands, Day One Ventures, and Betaworks. The latest round brings to $58 million the total raised by the company.

Budnitz, who previously started the collectible vinyl toy company Kid Robot before launching Superplastic, has continued to build out what he calls “an experimental character design studio, or lab, but you also could just say we’re the next massive character universe. We’re just doing it our own way.”

Crucial to the deal was Superplastic’s continued control over its characters and other intellectual property, a crucial deal point that many previous Hollywood suitors had not been willing to grant, Budnitz said.

Bernard called Budnitz “a force of nature,” and said it was the second synthetic celebrity that Alexa Fund had invested in, after Brud’s ground-breaking Lil Miquela.

Janky & Guggimon episodes will be an industry-standard 22 minutes in length, telling short stories that “need to arc into something longer,” Budnitz said. “I want that very badly.”

In turn, the animated series would fold in with the characters’ online “lives” and longer-term story arcs, and feed into the product, merchandise, and other ventures.

Bernard said in a release that “we see them as demonstrative of a new class of (intellectual property) that is going to be increasingly relevant with younger generations.”

He differentiated what Superplastic is doing from other kinds of digital characters that built with generative artificial-intelligence tools. Another Alexa investment involves a company called Splash that uses a generative AI program within a Roblox experience to create songs based on a person’s specifications, then uses the song as backing track for the person’s virtual karaoke performance.

But Bernard emphasized the expected continued role of humans in the creative process, even with synthetic celebrity projects.

“We’re believers that clever people will continue to be sources of inspiration and use tools,” Bernard said. “I don’t believe in a world of replacement. It’s an ‘And’ world. A number of forces are converging in equal measure, including just the demographics and increasing interest that younger people have in seeing themselves in a piece of AI or synthetic AI that’s embodied. There’s some agency in that. You saw that with Lil Miquela in the early days. People are willing to spend time with them and build relationships with them.”

Janky & Guggimon had already built a significant online following when they were part of a splashy 2021 NFT deal with Christie’s that included an elaborate backstory of the pair “breaking into” the auction house and causing an explosion that resulted in thousands of mashed-up unique digital collectible images which were then sold off. Budnitz said NFT sales have been a significant and somewhat unexpected source of income for the company.

More recently, Janky & Guggimon have seen their biggest online audience growth on TikTok, but also have been part of projects and brand deals such as launching the first Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, a project last summer with Gucci, and an appearance in Epic’s game platform, Fortnite. The characters have also done recent projects with Latin music star J. Balvin and hip hop star Vince Staples.

“My assertion is they’re actors and they do different stuff,” Budnitz said.

To accelerate the production process for Janky & Guggimon posts, allowing them to more quickly interact with 18 million followers on TikTok and other platforms, the company created a production system that marries Epic’s Unreal Engine with motion-capture suits and their own custom stack of software.

“Now, we could get (posts) out in hours that would have taken a month and a half in (industry-standard 3D software) Maya,” Budnitz said. “We can react and get right back in” the online conversation.

Other directions for Superplastic include creating music videos (Budnitz has long worked closely with Gorillaz, the hit-making music collective fronted by animated characters), and “some things coming with experiential and live experiences.” Other areas to come are two new “major characters,” ceramics-based products, and modest experiments in Web3 and Metaverse experiences, though Budnitz said the latter projects are “not who we are.”