If a great design has no impact, is it still great? At the end of the day, what matters is that people buy in to your idea, adopt your designs, and download your app. And a great design isn’t enough. You need to sell. You need to show that this design is your best work. That you’re ready to go out of your way to present it in the best possible light.

Early days

When I (Morten, Rotato’s founder) worked at Google’s in-house incubator, I found myself presenting new ideas and designs at a steady pace. I also found myself making boring slides, honestly. The partner team saw hundreds of pitches every month, and standing out was a matter of life and death for our team.

So I started making 3D mockups in Cinema 4D and After Effects. And I had to give up. It took way too long, and the results didn’t look great.

Building Rotato

I had to find a better way. I needed a 3D tool that could make Super Bowl ad-grade promo videos for an app in less than the 10 minutes I had left before my big presentation.

So I left Google in 2019 to found Rotato. Using realtime 3D technology otherwise created for high-performance gaming, I built a prototype for a Mac app that is almost as close to the GPU as you can get. That means it’s fast. The result is a never-before-seen level of speed and quality—and everything stays locally on your computer.

We since added more 3D models to the library, an animation timeline, a template system, and tons of optimizations. And we’re just getting started.