Foundry acquires AI tools firm Griptape
Foundry has acquired Griptape, the AI orchestration and generative AI tools development firm co-founded by animation veteran Jason Schleifer.
The company plans to integrate Griptape’s tech with its existing products, including Nuke, to enable users to “incorporate the outputs from a range of AI models into their creative workflow”.
What is Griptape?
Griptape was founded in 2023 by tech and VFX industry veterans including former AWS GM Kyle Roche and former AWS Principal Creative Director Jason Schleifer.
Schleifer was also previously Head of Character Animation at DreamWorks Animation before co-founding his own startup, Nimble Collective, which was acquired by AWS in 2019.
Griptape itself develops tools that enable users to deploy existing generative AI models in their own workflows, and to develop their own generative AI tools.
Foundry describes the company as a “pioneer in enterprise-grade AI orchestration”.
What does Griptape do?
Griptape’s flagship product, Griptape Nodes (shown above), provides a “new way for creative professionals to harness the full power of generative AI in their workflows”.
Rather than providing its own AI models, it offers less technically minded users with a way to combine and customize existing models, using a node-based drag-and-drop workflow.
It supports a range of models for generating images, video, 3D, text and audio, including those from the major developers – Google, Black Forest Labs, ByteDance, OpenAI, Alibaba, ElevenLabs, Topaz Labs, Luma, Deemos and Kuaishou – and users’ own custom models.
The firm’s other key product, Griptape Framework and its underlying Griptape Engine – is a more conventional platform for developing generative AI tools.
The open-source modular Python framework is aimed at coders, and is designed to simplify the development of generative AI applications.
Its final product, Griptape Cloud, is a platform for deploying AI tools online.
How does Griptape fit with Foundry’s AI strategy?
Foundry was one of the earliest major VFX tools developers to support AI workflows, rolling out AIR, its machine learning framework, in 2021, a few years before the current AI boom.
The toolset, available in the Nuke products, enables users of the compositing software to train their own neural networks to automate repetitive tasks like roto and marker removal.
Since then, Foundry hasn’t publicly released any major new AI tools, although it has continued to extend Nuke’s AI capabilities in its recent releases.
Foundry CEO Jody Madden commented that the company is “building the AI-first pipeline of the future”, and that Griptape is a “critical piece of [the] foundation to accelerate our roadmap”.
How will Griptape’s technology be used in Foundry products?
Foundry says that it plans to integrate Griptape with existing Foundry products, to enable “artists to easily incorporate the outputs from a range of AI models into their creative workflow”.
The product specifically namechecked in the FAQs is Nuke itself, although there are also obvious potential applications to tools like Flix, its story development platform.
Will Griptape’s products still be available individually?
Foundry says that it will “continue to develop Griptape’s offering”, although it isn’t entirely clear whether it will maintain all of the products in their current forms.
Its FAQs note that Griptape Framework is “currently available” open-source, but in future, it will “assess the best ways to provide both open-source access and specialized commercial features”.
There’s no mention at all of Griptape Cloud – of all of the existing Griptape products, the one that seems most distant from Foundry’s existing offerings – in the FAQs.
It also seems likely that the tools – which are currently aimed at a range of artists and developers – will become more narrowly specialized, with Foundry commenting that it plans to “enhance” them to meet the demands of VFX and animation pipelines.
We’ve contacted Foundry to see if we can get any more details, and will update if we hear back. For now, all of the Griptape products remain available on the Griptape website,
What other CG software can the Griptape tools be used with?
The Griptape tools support MCP (Model Context Protocol), the open standard for connecting AI models to external systems, so they can be connected to standard DCC applications.
Foundry’s FAQs on the acquisition namecheck Blender, Maya and Nuke, plus Autodesk’s Flow Production Tracking platform.
Price and system requirements
Griptape Nodes can be run locally or in the cloud, and is available as either a desktop application for Windows, Linux and macOS, or as an interface inside a web browser.
It is free to individual users, including for commercial use. Professional subscriptions cost $40/month, and support up to three users.
Griptape Framework is available under an Apache 2.0 license.
Read Foundry’s announcement that it has acquired Griptape
(Includes Foundry’s FAQs on the deal)
Visit the Griptape website
(More information about the products)
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