British startup Gravity Sketch, a product design and collaboration platform, today announces an approx. €3.1 million seed investment led by Kindred Capital with participation from Point Nine Capital and previous investors Forward Partners. The round brings the total amount raised by Gravity Sketch to €4.5 million, in addition to the initial grant funding from InnovationRCA and the James Dyson Foundation.
Gravity Sketch was founded in London in 2014 by Oluwaseyi Sosanya, Daniela Paredes and Daniel Thomas with the vision to revolutionise the way physical products are designed, developed, and brought to market. Today, the company is a leading innovator in the digital design industry, offering intuitive 3D design software for cross-disciplinary teams to create, collaborate, and review in an entirely new way, addressing a market worth an estimated €8.4 billion by 2022.
Designing, iterating and commercialising yet-to-be-realised products – be it a car, a pair of shoes, or a chair – is incredibly complex. It requires a great deal of back-and-forth between designers, engineers and manufacturing teams, and still heavily relies on pen-and-paper sketches. While the advent of CAD software has helped to digitise development cycles, a lack of tools for real-time collaboration and iteration between globally-distributed teams, particularly when communicating and creating in 3D, creates a number of inefficiencies throughout a product’s design process. This results in longer time frames when bringing a product to market, and incurs significant costs for manufacturers.
Combining intuitive design software with remote working tools, Gravity Sketch allows users to think and create in 3D while also bringing real-time collaboration to the front of the design process, enabling teams to revolutionise their workflow. This greatly streamlines product development cycles as well as reducing costs: in the automotive sector, an estimated €43 million can be saved by manufacturers when designing a new vehicle using the platform. Clients including Ford, Nissan and Reebok use Gravity Sketch, alongside 60 universities and over 50,000 creative professionals worldwide.
Today’s funding will enable the company to scale up the platform to become entirely hardware-agnostic (it works with a range of virtual reality hardware, and is currently in beta for iPad, mobile, and desktop) and make its full suite of tools more widely available to businesses and creative professionals alike.
Oluwaseyi Sosanya, CEO and co-founder of Gravity Sketch, said: “For years, product designers and engineers across myriad industries have been confined to technologies that aren’t fit for purpose to create and develop products for the physical world, with lengthy iterative processes causing protracted product development cycles, unnecessary costs, and a host of design frustrations. Gravity Sketch gives design and engineering teams across the globe a way to create, collaborate, and communicate together in the same virtual space, and in real-time. Today’s investment will help us make our technology as accessible and inclusive as possible.”
As part of the investment, Russell Buckley, who led the funding as Partner at Kindred Capital, will be joining the Gravity Sketch board. He said: “The acceleration of remote working in the digital design and tech space over the years has resulted in more demand than ever before for remote collaboration in the digital 3D landscape. Having already won audiences across some of the biggest names in industry as well as the creative professional community at-large, the team at Gravity Sketch has built a powerful set of technologies that we believe will lead to an incredible evolution in industrial and digital design. The company has huge potential and we’re delighted to support Oluwaseyi, Daniela and the team as they continue to grow Gravity Sketch.”
