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Polycaman app that uses a smartphone’s sensors to capture 3D scans of objects, is raising money from high-profile investors including Chad Hurley, co-founder of Adobe and YouTube.
Polycam announced today that it has closed an $18 million Series A round led by Left Lane Capital with participation from Adobe Ventures, Hurley and others. Chris Heinrich, co-founder and CEO of Polycam, says the capital will support new 3D editing and collaboration features, the training of AI models for rendering 3D objects, and the expansion of new markets.
Polycam was founded in early 2021 by Heinrich and Elliott Spelman, who met while working together at Ubiquity6, a startup developing mobile 3D scanning and AR technology. Both Heinrich and Spelman believed that 3D capture, made possible by hardware such as the lidar sensor in newer iPhones, could enable the creation of 3D content for the general public.
“One of the challenges and opportunities in the 3D modeling space is that the basic technology for 3D capture is far from perfect, and it’s not as simple as taking a photo with an iPhone,” Heinrich told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The good news is that advances in AI-driven 3D capture, coupled with the type of data Polycam has in bulk, are expected to significantly improve quality and ease of use over the coming years, enabling to increase use. cases and increase adoption.
Polycam offers a suite of 3D capture and modeling tools, each designed to meet a different use case.
Image credits: Polycam
On iPhones equipped with a lidar sensor, Polycam can scan a user’s surroundings, such as rooms in their home, in 3D. The app’s “Photo Mode,” available on mobile devices and the web, uses photogrammetry (capturing images and stitching them together) to create 3D models of objects. Polycam can capture 360-degree “photospheres” and skybox images from smartphone cameras. And — for users who want to integrate models into a project (a video game, for example) without having to capture them — the app hosts a library of free 3D models shared by the Polycam community.
Polycam makes money by charging a $100 per year subscription for advanced features aimed at professional users.
There are now a number of applications on the market for capturing 3D objects on smartphones. (See Lumiafor example.) But it is true that Polycam has benefited from market consolidation in recent years, with Niantic taking over ScanuniversAcquisition of Discord Ubiquity6 and instant purchase Third.
Today, Polycam has nearly 100,000 paying customers, Heinrich tells me, and its iPhone and Android apps have been downloaded more than 10 million times.
“Polycam was cash flow positive for several months in 2023 and saw strong revenue growth,” he added. “We were not materially affected by the slowdown in the technology sector, and delivered strong revenue growth despite a challenging macroeconomic environment.”
So why raise external capital? To “grow more aggressively,” Heinrich said, including through new AI-driven capabilities, launching enterprise subscription tiers and doubling its headcount to 22 by 2025.
Image credits: Polycam
To that end, Polycam is expanding into Vision Pro, Apple’s AR headset, which will become a key area of focus for the company in the coming months, Heinrich said. Polycam also trains AI models to fill in missed gaps in the 3D object scanning process — an investment that will increase the overall fidelity of Polycam’s scans, according to Heinrich.
“Even the best scans suffer from faulty and incomplete data, for example the inability to scan the underside of a sofa or a car,” he said. “That’s where AI comes in.”
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