May 2, 2023
Portfolio
Unusual

Why we’re leading Vizcom AI’s $5M Seed round

Sandhya Hegde
No items found.
Why we’re leading Vizcom AI’s $5M Seed roundWhy we’re leading Vizcom AI’s $5M Seed round
All posts
Editor's note: 

We are thrilled to announce our seed investment in Vizcom, a generative AI startup focused on helping professional 3D designers cut multiple tools and hours of rendering time from their paper-to-production workflow.

When we first started investing in generative AI applications, we saw two clear patterns of success. First, helping "unskilled" users become creative for the first time (for example: use Midjourney to go from 0 to 1 in art) and the second, helping skilled professionals save massive amounts of time by automating repetitive, "uncreative" tasks (eg: Github's Copilot to autocomplete code).

Vizcom's vision is the latter: to be a Copilot for all 3D product designers who currently use a combination of different complex Adobe and Autodesk products along with presentation tools to bring their imagination to life. With Vizcom's AI-native sketching tools and custom models, they can benefit from advances in AI while maintaining complete creative control and avoiding any concerns about copyright. Already serving many thousands of designers, with this raise, Vizcom will be expanding its offering from rendering sketches to 3D models. 

While being a perfect fit for our thesis, what really stood out to us were the founders. Vizcom's CEO Jordan Taylor has been a designer as long as he can remember, starting with graphic designs for T-shirts as a child growing up in Michigan. In his first job, he worked on automotive design at Honda and then moved to Silicon Valley to join the industrial design AI Research team at NVIDIA. This is where he first came into contact with the progress being made in generative AI.

Vizcom CEO Jordan Taylor (second from left) watching as design students try the product at Cycle's Creative Camp.

While still at NVIDIA in late 2020, Jordan started a design community, @DesignersPen, which now has nearly 80,000 followers on Instagram. His vision to help empower designers with AI — instead of disenfranchising them — is one that we and many companies across the world resonate with strongly.

We are so thrilled with the incredible response Vizcom has received from the design community as well as the Fortune 500 and are excited to be the lead seed investors in this passionate, talented, and diverse team building generative AI along with Basis Set and a slew of great angels, including Nat Friedman (Github), Oluwaseyi Sosanya (Gravity Sketch), and Dug Song (Duo).

Let's go!

A version of this post was originally published here on Sandhya Hegde’s LinkedIn Articles.

All posts

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.

All posts
May 2, 2023
Portfolio
Unusual

Why we’re leading Vizcom AI’s $5M Seed round

Sandhya Hegde
No items found.
Why we’re leading Vizcom AI’s $5M Seed roundWhy we’re leading Vizcom AI’s $5M Seed round
Editor's note: 

We are thrilled to announce our seed investment in Vizcom, a generative AI startup focused on helping professional 3D designers cut multiple tools and hours of rendering time from their paper-to-production workflow.

When we first started investing in generative AI applications, we saw two clear patterns of success. First, helping "unskilled" users become creative for the first time (for example: use Midjourney to go from 0 to 1 in art) and the second, helping skilled professionals save massive amounts of time by automating repetitive, "uncreative" tasks (eg: Github's Copilot to autocomplete code).

Vizcom's vision is the latter: to be a Copilot for all 3D product designers who currently use a combination of different complex Adobe and Autodesk products along with presentation tools to bring their imagination to life. With Vizcom's AI-native sketching tools and custom models, they can benefit from advances in AI while maintaining complete creative control and avoiding any concerns about copyright. Already serving many thousands of designers, with this raise, Vizcom will be expanding its offering from rendering sketches to 3D models. 

While being a perfect fit for our thesis, what really stood out to us were the founders. Vizcom's CEO Jordan Taylor has been a designer as long as he can remember, starting with graphic designs for T-shirts as a child growing up in Michigan. In his first job, he worked on automotive design at Honda and then moved to Silicon Valley to join the industrial design AI Research team at NVIDIA. This is where he first came into contact with the progress being made in generative AI.

Vizcom CEO Jordan Taylor (second from left) watching as design students try the product at Cycle's Creative Camp.

While still at NVIDIA in late 2020, Jordan started a design community, @DesignersPen, which now has nearly 80,000 followers on Instagram. His vision to help empower designers with AI — instead of disenfranchising them — is one that we and many companies across the world resonate with strongly.

We are so thrilled with the incredible response Vizcom has received from the design community as well as the Fortune 500 and are excited to be the lead seed investors in this passionate, talented, and diverse team building generative AI along with Basis Set and a slew of great angels, including Nat Friedman (Github), Oluwaseyi Sosanya (Gravity Sketch), and Dug Song (Duo).

Let's go!

A version of this post was originally published here on Sandhya Hegde’s LinkedIn Articles.

All posts

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.