SUMMARY
The round was led by pi Ventures and also saw participation from Better Capital, Java Capital, and other angel investors
The startup will use the funding to ramp up hiring across business functions and to build a robust go-to-market product for drone-based mapping and surveying
Preimage uses AI to create 3D digital clones using photos as input, and claims that its solution can be scaled up to tens and thousands of images using fast and automated workflows
3D reconstruction startup Preimage has raised INR 14 Cr ($1.7 Mn) in a seed round led by pi Ventures. The round also saw participation from Better Capital, Java Capital, and other angel investors.
The startup will use the funding to scale up its product build and ramp up hiring across business functions. The investment will also be deployed to build a robust go-to-market product for drone-based mapping and surveying.
“The market for the creation of 3D digital clones of real-world environments is gaining momentum across several businesses in different verticals. We are one of the first companies in the world to rethink this (3D digital reconstruction) market and empower users with the advances of AI (artificial intelligence) to handle the scale of visual data for the current decade,” its CEO and cofounder Ugam Kamat said.
Founded in 2020 by IIT-Bombay alumni Kamat and IIT Kharagpur passout Siddharth Jha, Preimage uses AI to create 3D digital clones using photos as input. Preimage claims that its solution can be scaled up to tens and thousands of images using fast and automated workflows.
“…traditional tools for 3D reconstruction plagued with long processing time, inadequate accuracy and a lack of generalizability are unable to fulfill the market demand…Preimage solves this problem using deep learning AI models and distributed computing to build a horizontal platform that can cater to multiple industries while being fast and accurate,” pi Ventures MD Roopan Aulakh said.
The startup had raised $355K in pre-seed funding from Better Capital, Arka Ventures and iSeed Venture.
Preimage released a beta version of its product earlier this year, which it claims ‘engaged’ with more than 200 businesses across the US, India, Asia Pacific, and Europe. The startup plans to release its full-fledged 3D reconstruction platform later this year.
The startup primarily competes with global players such as Clobotics and Luma Interactive in the nascent space.
This comes close on the heels of tech giant Meta announcing the release of its under-development 3D tool Implicitron that renders prototypes of real-life objects. In March this year, chipmaker Nvidia also released Instant NeRF which can reconstruct a 3D scene from multiple 2D images.
According to a report, the global 3D reconstruction market was pegged at around $816.6 Mn back in 2020 and is expected to soar to $1.2 Bn by 2026 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.96%.
