CEO / Co-Founder at Figment
Shubha Jagannatha
Builder and artist with an undying love for great storytelling + world-building. Spent my career shuffling between innovative startups and studios, with the past three years at Pixar Animation Studios where I led the charge in crafting the technical wizardry behind our 3D filmmaking pipeline for five unique animated masterpieces. Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences with specializations in Computer Vision, Graphics, and XR from UC Berkeley. Chronically wandering the internet, sharing learnings & ideas everywhere online.
Questions & Answers
What inspired you to start your business?
I spent a few years shuffling between innovative startups and the world’s best studios, knowing that someday, I would build a company that stood at the intersection of the two. I spent my last three years at Pixar watching the whole landscape of media transform in front of my eyes. Through the streaming wars, breakthrough innovations in generative AI, writers/actors strikes, and mass layoffs marking a decline of the industry titans, I knew the future of storytelling innovation would lie in a small and innovative company that held to the principles and spirit of an artist. From my time spent at Pixar, I knew the creative and technical talent pools at these media companies are grossly underutilized and hungry. At the same time, AI tools had made executing on creative and technical ideas 1000x faster. There could not have been a better time to go for it and start this business. I found the perfect team to build a groundbreaking company to define a whole new class of media built on AI.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
The problem we’re tackling: what is the sticky consumer experience that will define excellence in this new medium of storytelling with AI? And soon after, how do we engineer a scalable pipeline for authoring these experiences? Our lean team is a powerhouse of experts in AI, infrastructure, gaming, product, storytelling, and art. We have a unique combination of backgrounds that span innovative Silicon Valley startups and established, world-class studios (Pixar + Epic Games), bringing together the resourceful agility of a startup with the precision and excellence of a well-oiled production machine. For the sticky consumer experience — our team has a track record of designing and delivering on some of the most culture-defining media of the modern age, from the latest Pixar hit to Fortnite. For the tooling and pipeline, we have 3 technical experts with 4 patents and 5 film pipelines under our belt. There is no better team in existence to pioneer an entirely new format of storytelling.
