Pasadena based company, Polycam, has announced a fresh round of funding with an $18M Series A, led by Left Lane Capital and Adjacent. This milestone marks a pivotal moment in the company’s journey to democratize the realm of 3D content creation, an ambition it has nurtured since its inception three years ago.
“The incumbent 3D tools, such as Maya and Cinema4D, were created in the 90s and lack many of the features expected of modern creator tools, such as AI powered and collaborative workflows, that Polycam is building into the core of their product. We are confident that Polycam will continue to push the 3D market forward ahead of its peers, democratizing access for a new generation of 3D creators.”Harley Miller, CEO and Managing Partner at Left Lane Capital.Tweet
This investment is further bolstered by the support of an impressive roster of angel investors, including Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube, Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital, Julien Chaumond, co-founder of Hugging Face, and Barry McCardel, co-founder of Hex. Their involvement underscores the broad industry belief in the transformative potential of 3D technology.
The recent launch of the Vision Pro has solidified the company’s belief that 3D is the next significant creative medium. Despite the clear potential, the Polycam team recognizes the existing barriers that have prevented 3D creation from becoming mainstream—namely, the complexity and time-consuming nature of current digital 3D content creation tools.
To combat this, Polycam is on a mission to build innovative, AI-first, cloud-first, and collaboration-first tools designed from the ground up. These tools aim to simplify the 3D creation process, making it faster, more intuitive, and accessible to creators at all levels.
“3D capture is where photography was at the start of the 20th century,” says Spelman. “We see Polycam as the 3D equivalent of the Kodak Brownie camera - an easy way for millions of people to gain access to a magical, new kind of imaging technology.”Elliott SpelmanTweet
There has been a definitive shift over the last year towards approaching 3D in a different way. Radiance field methods, such as Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have played a role in the shift, given their meteoric progression and stronger output. It was just a few months ago that Polycam had announced their first foray into radiance field methods, with Gaussian Splatting.
Polycam’s CEO, Chris Heinrich, had indicated Polycam’s profitability towards the middle of last year, but with the rate of technology expansion combined with hardware foundations beginning to be set for 3D, I imagine he felt he needed to return to venture capital. Polycam currently boasts upwards of 100K paying subscribers.
This fundraising announcement follows not too long after Luma AI announced their $43M Series B. It is exciting to see another large fundraising round for a 3D company and continues to set a precedent for future companies looking to fundraise.
As Polycam embarks on this next phase of growth, it extends an invitation to those who share its passion for 3D creation to join the team. Polycam has a few openings, one of which is targeting engineers who can help build text or image to 3D, giving an insight into one of the priorities for the team.
With this new influx of funding, Polycam is poised to accelerate its mission of democratizing 3D creation. The investment will enable the company to further innovate and expand its offerings, making the creation of digital 3D content and experiences more accessible than ever before. As Polycam continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in 3D creation, the future looks bright for creators and the industry at large.
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