Investing in Vizcom and the future of 3D Product Design

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

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 eg: 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 (for 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 and slow Adobe and Autodesk products 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.

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.

While still at NVIDIA in late 2020, he started a design community (@DesignersPen) which now has nearly 80k 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!

Sandhya, Alisa Parrett and team Unusual Ventures