CoFounder and CEO at Uthana
Viren Tellis
Viren is a co-founder and CEO of Uthana, a startup that builds generative AI for motion, creating realistic and interactive content for gaming and entertainment. He has over 15 years of experience in strategy, management, product, and operations, spanning various industries and domains. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Hedado, a philanthropic platform that modernizes corporate giving and empowers individuals and SMBs to donate to causes they care about. Previously, he was a vice president at AppNexus (acquired by AT&T and becoming Xandr), where he led product and operations teams. He started his career as a consultant and analyst at Cornerstone Research, and in parallel co-owned and operated a Quiznos Sub franchise. He holds a JD-MBA from Northwestern University and a BS in Business Administration from USC.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
My brother Kethan spent years engineering animation for Call of Duty, and I led product and operations for a massive real-time ad marketplace. We wanted to start something together, so we circled back to his domain—3D animation—and realized our combined backgrounds were the perfect fit. Then ChatGPT launched and forced us to ask: how will generative AI transform this field? We see a future where characters react to environments and gameplay on the fly, producing motion so lifelike you can’t tell it’s AI-driven. Knowing this evolution was inevitable, we founded our company to make it happen—merging his deep animation expertise with my experience in data, algorithms, and real-time infrastructure. We believe AI-generated 3D animation is the next big leap, and we’re building it now.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
We have two big differentiators. First, we secured an exclusive, 10-year partnership with a top motion capture studio that typically serves triple-A games and Hollywood films. That gives us unique, high-fidelity data—and we’ve navigated actor rights and studio contracts so we can legally train on it. It’s a huge competitive moat, since collecting premium 3D motion data is costly and time-consuming. Second, quality matters in 3D animation. Animators have a highly trained eye, so off-the-shelf AI solutions often don’t meet their quality bar. Our team includes engineers who’ve spent years solving animation problems in games like Call of Duty and Tomb Raider; they know exactly what “high fidelity” means in a triple-A pipeline. Most AI teams don’t have deep game dev experience plus specialized data. We do, and that’s why we can build real-time generative motion tools that truly match industry standards—and eventually make AI-driven movement indistinguishable from the real thing.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
A conversation with the CTO of one of our design partners really drove it home: the big bottleneck in animation isn’t just cost, it’s the painfully slow iteration cycles. He talked about how his studio sometimes settled for “good enough” because going back to a mocap stage was too time-consuming and expensive. That flipped a switch for me: AI animation isn’t just about saving money; it’s about letting developers iterate at lightspeed. If you can create and refine animations in days instead of months, you can push for truly standout quality. That’s now our north star—giving teams room to try bold ideas, respond to feedback right away, and never again say, “We don’t have time to do anything else.” My big “aha” was seeing AI as a creativity booster, not just a budget-cutter.
