LottieFiles, an animation file platform led by Maldivian developers, has secured Series A funding of USD 9 million from Microsoft Inc.
LottieFiles was founded in 2018 as a platform for JSON-based Lottie animations. Based in San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur, LottieFiles has about one million users from 65,000 companies, including Airbnb, Google, TikTok, Disney and Netflix. The funding secured from Microsoft brings the total raised by the platform to about USD 10 million.
LottieFiles was co-founded by Maldivian developer Nasrulla Adnan, and has several Maldivian developers leading its team. Following the report of the funding secured by LottieFiles, President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih congratulated the company for its success in its startup venture and expressed pride that homegrown Maldivian innovation is instrumental in this success given the pivotal role played by Maldivian developers at the company.
Meanwhile, Minister of Economic Development Fayyaz Ismail also congratulated LottieFiles and expressed pride of the success achieved by young Maldivian developers. He said this underscores the idea of establishing such an ecosystem here in the Maldives, and pledged to redouble the efforts to do so.
LottieFiles is the leading online platform for Lottie animations. Lottie animations are smaller than GIF or PNG graphics and have the advantage of being scalable and interactive. It was first introduced as an open-source library by Airbnb engineers and quickly became popular with app developers because Lottie files can be used across platforms without additional coding and edited after shipping.