Rokoko

Rokoko is the volume leader in democratized motion capture, and its position is built on a moat the AI-video wave cannot simply inference away: physics. The Copenhagen company (founded 2014 by Jakob Balslev, Matias Sondergaard, and Anders Klok) made its name selling the Smartsuit Pro — an IMU suit at roughly €2,500, an order of magnitude below optical stages — plus Smartgloves and face capture, to a customer base of indie animators, game studios, and vTubers that optical incumbents like Vicon never addressed. Where video-based AI mocap struggles — occlusion, contact-rich movement, capture outside a camera frustum, real-time streaming without cloud round-trips — inertial hardware still wins, and the Coil Pro's EMF positioning attacks IMU drift, the traditional knock on suits. Critically, Rokoko is on both sides of the disruption: Rokoko Vision, its free video-based AI capture tool, functions as a top-of-funnel that converts no-hardware experimenters into suit buyers when they hit Vision's quality ceiling, an ecosystem play competitors on either side (hardware-only Movella, software-only startups) cannot run. The strategic investment led by Naver Z — operator of Zepeto, one of the largest avatar social platforms — ties Rokoko into the creator-avatar economy at platform scale, and the 2022 round at an $80M valuation was raised on genuine unit sales, not narrative. With RADiCAL's technology absorbed into Autodesk and its standalone service shut down in July 2026, the accessible-mocap field has consolidated in Rokoko's favor: it is the remaining brand that owns hardware, software, and a 51–200-person operating business serving the long tail.