We live in a 3D world but most of the products that we use were designed using a 2D methodology, which led to an increase in product development time as engineers and product designers went back and forth. Thanks to Gravity Sketch, the product design and collaboration platform that allows engineers and product designers to work in 3D, the process is becoming more streamlined, changing a paradigm that has persisted for decades. By designing in 3D from the onset, the need to sketch and then transfer into clunky CAD software is eliminated. The platform is already being used by over 50,000 design professionals.
London TechWatch caught up with Cofounder and CEO Oluwaseyi Sosanya to learn more about how an academic project inspired the launch of the business, future plans, fundraising process, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised £3M as an official Seed investment round. This round was led by Russell Buckley from Kindred Capital followed by Point Nine Capital and our pre-seed investors Forward Partners doing their pro-rata. This round brings the total amount we’ve raised to £4.2 million, in addition to the initial grant funding from InnovationRCA, Innovate UK, EuroHorizon 2020, and the James Dyson Foundation.
Tell us about your product or service:
Gravity Sketch is an immersive product design and collaboration platform that allows design and engineering teams to create in 3D while also bringing real-time collaboration to the front of the design process, enabling teams to revolutionise their workflow. The software is being used by design studios at Ford, Nissan, Reebok, over 60 universities, and over 50,000 creative professionals worldwide
What inspired the start of Gravity Sketch?
Gravity Sketch began as an academic project – my cofounder and I were looking to develop a more effective process for design and engineering teams to collaborate, essentially disrupting how we (as designers and engineers) create and communicate 3D ideas before they become physical products. We founded the company on the 22nd of September 2014 with the vision to revolutionise the way physical products are designed, developed, and brought to market following our graduation thesis work.
We started Gravity Sketch with clear industry insight. We were professional designers in the industry for many years before founding the company and have intrinsic knowledge of the challenges teams face when bringing products to life. The most challenging part of the process was transferring ideas from 2D to digital 3D. We felt there was a great possibility to develop a tool that could one day remove the 2D phase from the process completely, allowing designers to think and create in 3D from day one.
How is it different?
We take for granted how much work goes into the everyday objects like the keyboards we type on and the chairs we sit in. A lot of design and engineering work goes into the physical world around us and when we talk about designing a physical product, we’re imagining this object in 3D. However, for many years we have had to bring out that idea through 2D mediums, or through rough physical models.
The design workflow in industrial design remains what it has been for the past 30-years and still occurs in two dimensions – initially on paper, then typically in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
In order to bring the idea to manufacturability through today’s modern techniques, a digital 3D model must then be made. Engineering software (CAD) is used to create these models, for which the operator requires several months of training. This process also requires a lot of back and forth between designers and engineering teams in a company, resulting in compromises due to poor collaboration tools and an attempt to keep to the designated timeframe for delivery must be made.
Our focus on a simple and extremely intuitive user experience allows designers to sketch and model directly in 3D, which significantly reduces the time to go from idea to a 3D sketch. Gravity Sketch brings the designer into the digital 3D space from the initial sketch phase, which gives the designer more control over the initial idea.
Several 3D sketching tools have entered the market, but these tools are not compatible with the CAD software used in product development. In contrast, Gravity Sketch uses mesh representation for visual rendering purposes, but its underlying engine is different. Non-Uniform Rational Basis Splines (NURBS), which are used by mathematics for defining a shape and are infinitely editable and scalable, is the starting point for Gravity Sketch’s competitive advantage. It enables 100% file import/export compatibility with industry-standard CAD software
Gravity Sketch is the only creation tool on the market that also enables real-time collaboration between multiple stakeholders in different locations. This is more important than ever as consumers demand products sooner, with more features, and produced more sustainably, all created by globally distributed design and engineering teams, who need to stay connected in order to deliver with the same accuracy they once did being in the same location.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We are focused on the 3D design and engineering software tools market. Based on analysis by the independent market research firm EMBS Group, the total addressable market is $10bn by 2022.
This includes the CAD Market Share, which is projected as a $7.56 Billion market as well as the vastly larger digital design software space where companies like Adobe operate. This is a vastly larger market where we see customers migrating to 3D in the next few years with the rise of spatial computing.
What’s your business model?
We are a SaaS business and sell yearly subscriptions for our services to enterprises and small-to-medium design studios. These subscriptions are primarily for collaboration, storage, and support with updates and new design and collaboration tools.
How will this funding allow you to be hardware agnostic? Is one specific hardware most commonly used by your competitors?
We are creating a platform that allows for all forms of access and input. We feel strongly about giving creative teams the opportunity to work in the way they want, as opposed to prescribing a fixed way of using the tool. This approach will open the greatest possibilities for workflow integration which will help foster a stronger variety of design workflows.
We are widening the offering with cross-hardware collaboration (VR/AR/iPad/Desktop) for design and review purposes, essentially allowing teams to hold real-time immersive remote meetings through our cloud platform, LandingPad. Our ambition is to provide the best creation and collaboration experience for users. We see a future where we (as creative people) are generating all of our early-stage designs in 3D, and holding design reviews in 3D from the onset.
We will also introduce 2D screen support to enable teams to join virtual collaboration sessions from VR, iPad, or Desktop. With a screen-based version of the product, we can reach more designers and expand beyond industrial design workflows. to include creatives from a variety of backgrounds who are keen to get involved with 3D sketching, but have yet to integrate immersive technologies into their workflow.
Making our technology as accessible and inclusive as possible has led to some amazing insights and helped us build a product that can be used by a wide variety of design disciplines.
What was the funding process like?
When we set out to raise investment we looked at the current composition of the board and advisory board to identify areas we wanted to strengthen. We also looked at the performance of the company over the past 18months to better understand what the company needed to improve upon.
We then made a plan against our 12-month goals for the business and product. From this point, we had a good idea of how much money we would need to raise to achieve our goals (business a product) as well as what type of profile and support the company was missing at the board and management level.
With this recipe, we discussed with our existing investors and wider network to gain intros to investors who would be supportive and aligned with our objectives. Our pitches went well and we got into deeper discussions with the investors. In some cases, we couldn’t even finish the pitch because we got so deep into questions, the industry, and what we were building.
We made a list of the investors in a shared spreadsheet with our advisory board. We captured as much information about the investor and the VC they represented. From there we shared the sheet with our board and advisors to identify who would be able to make an introduction and who we should pitch to for the first second and third round of pitching (we broke things down into rounds of intense weeks of pitching). We find that introductions to VCs always were better than cold emails/calls. Each round of pitching was about 2-3 weeks with a two-week break between to sync with the team and enhance the pitch and story. After the three rounds of pitching, we landed with a tighter list of investors who were very keen about the opportunity to invest, about seven VCs. From this point, we dived in deeper with each VC to better understand what they would bring to the board and share more about our long term vision. We received a few term sheets at the end of this exercise, at this point a lot of the decision came down to terms but just as important the personality and feeling we got from the Investors who would be joining our company. The point here is that this person will be a part of your team and for us, it is important to have a cultural alignment in terms of how we work and communicate; this also made the decision a lot easier.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The product we are developing is quite ahead of its time, companies have yet to adopt AR and VR technologies into their workflow as such we must sell to customers who are forward-thinking early adopters, fundamentally disruptors like ourselves. This puts the responsibility to articulate the value proposition and market size on us and a small set of early adopter customers.
With new technology platforms and ways of computing, we found that there is a lot of education that must be done. We built a strong education component of the digital 3D landscape into our pitch. The investors who got what we were doing had done their due diligence, not on the industry, but the potential growth of the sector and well as adjacent verticals including applications in the entertainment industry and growing investment in VR/AR/MR hardware by big tech.
With new technology platforms and ways of computing, we found that there is a lot of education that must be done. We built a strong education component of the digital 3D landscape into our pitch. The investors who got what we were doing had done their due diligence, not on the industry, but the potential growth of the sector and well as adjacent verticals including applications in the entertainment industry and growing investment in VR/AR/MR hardware by big tech.
The COVID-19 epidemic did not fully affect the round, but it did cause many more remote meetings. We were lucky to have met all of the VCs that are joining this round prior to lockdown, which gave everyone involved peace of mind.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
After speaking with so many investors, there are two things that the investors we work with look for. First, a founding team with drive and industry experience and second, an opportunity to invest in a company that is disrupting a very large bloated industry.
Our investors like us and believe in us, as a team. From the outset, they liked our scrappy bootstrap approach and how fast we were able to engage with large multinationals.
Testimonials from our community of professionals from the automotive and entertainment industries who were using our software about the value of the tools we had developed gave the investors comfort in the stickiness of our product. Our existing client base of large enterprise clients spoke to the use case for Gravity Sketch.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We will expand our offering with a monthly pricing tier for SMB customers and launch web browser collaboration tools.
We will introduce 2D screen support to enable teams to join virtual collaboration sessions from VR, iPad, or Desktop.
We will diversity the hardware that we support, bring a stand-alone version of the tools to web, desktop, and mobile. Our standalone desktop Wacom tablet version will also arrive within the year.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
It may sound simple, but I’d consider if you need to raise money. If you can stay lean for another 12 months, do it, this allows you to better understand your market, customers, and technology. We operated the company from 2014-2018 without raising money.
It may sound simple, but I’d consider if you need to raise money. If you can stay lean for another 12 months, do it, this allows you to better understand your maker, customers, and technology. We operated the company from 2014-2018 without raising money.
I’d recommend looking at government grants, conducting pilots with customers, testing slightly cheaper price points to early adopters, asking your community for donations, and investing your own money.
Finally, if you will lose your competitive edge without an injection of capital, ask yourself why and if you are too late to the market.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We have been extremely focused on our current customers. With the rise of the remote working environment for design studios across the transportation industry, in particular, several of our customers are reevaluating what working from home looks like. How can we help our customers design their products without having the team together to brainstorm and ideate? I am extremely proud of the dedication the team has to the user and helping our customers solve problems. We will always double down on customer success.
We have extended our support for the broader design community with the deployment of real-time collaboration features to our individual professional design users. We will offer free trials and increased collaboration functionality, expanding the benefits of Gravity Sketch to smaller design studios.
What’s your favorite tourist destination in London?
I am a big fan of the museums and galleries. I went to school at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art which is situated on Exhibition Road and would often spend my lunchtime in the Victoria & Albert Museum as well as the Natural History and Science museums. We also had Hyde Park across the street which had both Serpentine galleries. Each year the Serintine would have a fantastic pavilion designed by a guest architect or designer. This extreme concentration of art, design, science, and culture is something that is really amazing about this part of London and it will forever be a special place for me.
In fact, the idea for Gravity Sketch was sparked at an exhibition in the Science Museum at a 2013 exhibition, ‘3D: Printing the Future.’ The exhibition showcased 3D printed engineering designs and products. As designers, we could tell exactly what software was used to create each thing on exhibit and had the realization that the learning curve for standard CAD tools is quite steep, meaning that only a limited few people could actually engage in this Future. We knew then and there that we could tackle this barrier, and Gravity Sketch was born.
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