News
Foundry Acquires Griptape
Foundry Acquires Griptape to Accelerate AI Integration Across VFX and Animation Pipelines
LONDON – February 18, 2026 – Foundry, the leading developer of creative software for the Media and Entertainment industry, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Griptape, a pioneer in enterprise-grade AI orchestration. This acquisition accelerates Foundry's AI strategy, adding critical orchestration capabilities to complement the AI-powered features in Foundry's product portfolio, which began in 2021 with the release of CopyCat.
The acquisition of Griptape represents the next evolution of this strategy, enabling studios to orchestrate multiple AI models and agents within secure, professional workflows that connect seamlessly with Foundry's existing creative toolsets.
As studios shift from experimentation to everyday production use, the need for better control of AI models has become critical. Griptape enables controlled access to rapidly evolving open-source and commercial AI models in a user-friendly framework, whilst balancing the strict security and traceability required by major production environments.
Foundry will continue to develop Griptape’s offering, enhancing Griptape’s unique strengths to meet the demands of VFX and Animation pipelines, and will integrate with creative toolsets including Nuke, the industry standard for compositing.
Unlike alternatives, Griptape offers a robust, highly extensible Python-based architecture designed for scale, workflow longevity, and integration with existing infrastructure including production management and render farm hand-offs. Beyond simple conversational interfaces, Griptape enables creation and management of secure, programmable agents that can support tasks within Griptape and across the pipeline.
"Our mission has always been to empower the world’s most ambitious storytellers," said Jody Madden, CEO of Foundry. "By bringing Griptape into Foundry, we can provide the tools our customers want to realise their creative vision more efficiently, while retaining control. We've been investing in AI and ML capabilities for years, and many of our customers are already using AI-powered features daily," said Jody Madden, CEO of Foundry. "We are building the AI-first pipeline of the future—and Griptape is a critical piece of that foundation to accelerate our roadmap."
"Foundry is the natural home for Griptape," said Kyle Roche, Founder & CEO of Griptape. "Their deep history in VFX and Animation combined with their industry-leading products, existing AI capabilities, and incorporation of AI into core workflows, provides the perfect platform to scale our technology and reach every major studio globally."
FAQ
What is Griptape Nodes?
Griptape Nodes is a visual interface that allows artists to build AI-driven workflows without writing code. Griptape Nodes is available as a browser interface or a Windows application, which can be run either in the cloud or on-premises.
What is the Griptape Framework and Griptape Engine?
The Griptape Framework is a Python toolkit enabling developers to build secure GenAI applications and agents that connect to existing studio pipelines. This includes the Griptape Engine which orchestrates the execution of workflows, and can be run either in the cloud or on-premises.
Does Griptape support on-premises deployment?
Yes. Both Griptape Engine and Griptape Nodes can be run either in the cloud or on-premises, allowing studios to run AI automation locally to meet strict security requirements.
Which AI models are supported by Griptape?
Griptape is model-agnostic, supporting both open-source and proprietary models for text, image, video, 3D, and audio generation. Griptape includes standard integrations with many leading model vendors including Google, Black Forest Labs, ByteDance, OpenAI, Alibaba, ElevenLabs, Topaz Labs, Luma, Rodin, and Kuaishou. Customers can also connect with a wide range of models from HuggingFace, or bring their own diffusion models.
How does Griptape integrate with current VFX & Animation pipelines?
Griptape is a Python-based framework, enabling immediate integration with studio pipelines. Griptape also supports MCP, enabling agentic workflows with common DCCs such as Maya, Blender, and Nuke and with production management systems like Flow Production Tracking.
Will the Griptape Framework remain open source?
Griptape Framework and Griptape Engine are currently available under the open source Apache 2.0 license. Foundry is committed to the Griptape developer community. As the platform evolves to meet the high-security and high-scale requirements of global studios, Foundry will continue to assess the best ways to provide both open-source access and specialized commercial features.
What does this acquisition mean for Foundry users?
We are excited to leverage Foundry’s expertise in creative workflows to continue to build Griptape as a platform for orchestrating creative and pipeline processes. We plan to integrate Griptape with existing Foundry products, enabling artists to easily incorporate the outputs from a range of AI models into their creative workflow.