In July 2021, Jordan Taylor left his assignment as a commercial designer at Nvidia to work on an assignment in his living room with a school friend: creating software that would enable commercial designers to perform their tasks better and more efficiently. With a few million dollars in funding, Taylor’s startup Vizcom has landed major customers, adding Ford and New Balance for its commercial design software.
Vizcom, based in Mountain View, California, is now moving beyond its startup days. The company announced that it has raised $20 million, led through Index Ventures, to expand research and development.
“Progress is going beyond what I originally anticipated,” Taylor, 28, who also worked as a car designer for Honda, told Forbes. “I didn’t even realize what it meant to be a business. “
The investment is “very competitive,” said Nina Achadjian, wife of Index Ventures, who led the investment. He said Taylor’s youths and hobbies reminded him of other young superstar founders supported through Index, such as Figma founder Dylan Field, now 32. and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, now 27.
Taylor, the company’s chief executive, and co-founder Kaelan Richards, also 28 and responsible for the company’s leading generation, first met in fifth grade in Rochester Hills, a suburb of Detroit, where the auto industry is at the center of everyday life. At his age, Taylor was full of ideas. While still in school, he built prototype cars, made gameplay videos on YouTube (“I was passionate about building a network of gamers,” he said), and started a business promoting T-shirts and other items. Clothes with graphic designs after her parents bought her a screen printer. “I know that when Jordan has an idea, he has something in mind,” said Richards, who in the past worked as a software engineer at lending giant UWM. The curve. “
Taylor’s idea for Vizcom came from his own work. I had usually worked with drawings in Photoshop, which involved a tedious process of hand-coloring every time a drawing was updated. “I started getting a lot of data about the future of AI. How can I create something that speeds up my own workflow?He said, “So I called Kaelan and said, ‘I’m going to leave Nvidia in two weeks and live off my savings. ‘»
Richards quit his own assignment and drove from Michigan to California. The two founders locked themselves in Taylor’s living room, designing Vizcom’s software and dining on hot dogs at Costco to save money. Still, Richards spent all his savings and moved back in with his Michigan to cut costs.
Things changed after Vizcom entered the first cohort of the AI Grant accelerator, funded through Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, and Daniel Gross, an early investor in Stripe, Coinbase, and Figma. The program began in November 2022. Two months later, it raised $5 million in seed funding, led through Unusual Ventures.
Drawing on his previous experience creating YouTube videos, Taylor made his own demos of the product, showing the company’s 4,700 YouTube subscribers how to turn an undeniable comic strip into a photographic representation with natural language commands and then refine the concept with just a few clicks. .
Ford, one of its first enterprise consumers in April 2023 after a member of its R team
Today, the company has dozens of business consumers as well as individual business users who pay monthly. As Vizcom adds more and more AI features to its software, those business consumers can integrate the wealth of knowledge they’ve received from previous product designs. You can, for example, extract details about product sketches, packaging design, and branding over the years to create traditional models of that company’s aesthetic. Earlier this month, the company also began rolling out new 3D modeling features into the software.
Eventually, Taylor said he hopes to be able to go straight from rendering in the software to a 3D printer so that the concept can seamlessly move from the designer’s head to a physical prototype. “I think one day I’ll be able to upload a line drawing to Vizcom and a 3D printer will start,” he said.