The 3D creation market is growing fast and businesses are eager to get involved.
We chat with Daniela Paredes Fuentes, co-founder of Gravity Sketch, to find out more about her business.
How did Gravity Sketch come about and what is its USP?
Gravity Sketch came about off the back of a university project.
During my studies at The Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, I met Oluwaseyi Sosanya, my Gravity Sketch co-founder. We discovered a shared interest in how spatial intelligence can enable designers to quickly and easily visualise and conceptualise their designs.
With this focus, we developed a 3D creation tool which evolved into Gravity Sketch. Recognising that it had the potential to become a viable commercial solution for designers, we started the business and ran it in parallel with our last year at university.
Gravity Sketch is now one of the fastest-growing 3D creation start-ups, providing designers with a tool to quickly and easily create in 3D.
Who is your target audience?
We operate a B2B model targeting multiple sectors including automotive, concept arts and education. However, the reality is that anyone who is interested in design would be able to use Gravity Sketch as a 3D creation tool.
How did you secure funding for the business?
Since starting the business, we have raised a total of $1.7m over four rounds, with the last one being a seed round. The investment has come from a combination of grants (both government and non-government) and venture capital funding.
Learn how entrepreneur, Michael Rossman, secured seed funding
What challenges do you face in running your business?
There are many challenges that we face in running the business – both product/technology and business-wise. For instance, we are operating in an era where technology is changing on a daily basis. We need to be constantly evolving our software to keep up with how technology is advancing while simultaneously delivering the right experience to our users.
“We need to be constantly evolving our software to keep up with how technology is advancing”
Running a business is also a challenge, although we have a team of experienced advisors who ensure that we are following the right path and challenging ourselves and our ambitions. Adoption is another challenge. We know that our tool enables designers to create in a much more immersive way than traditional tools. However, there is a whole education piece involved in getting designers to switch from what they have used for years to some entirely different technologies.
The biggest challenge is that we are competing with industry giants. We usually find ourselves in conversations where we are the only start-up.
This is one of the things that motivates us the most – a David vs Goliath sort of thing.
Gravity Sketch has community-based sketches on Instagram. How do they help your business?
Instagram has such a massive audience, reaching people from all walks of life.
Having community-based sketches on Instagram not only opens us up to new customers using the tool but it also shows just how easy it is to design using Gravity Sketch and the truly professional work that can come from using the tool.
Instagram helps us communicate with our users and interact with the ever-growing Gravity Sketch community of over 8000 prosumer (someone who consumes and produces a product) users out there. For our company, user feedback is one of the most important things in our day-to-day business. We make decisions based on feedback and Instagram helps us communicate with our community.
What are your business goals over the next five years?
Over the next five years we have many things that we want to achieve.
I’ll give you a few examples: expanding our product range to target new sectors; growing both our business and our team; building brand awareness in priority and emerging markets; and ultimately creating the most flexible product for delivering more creative workflows.
The good news is that things are looking very positive. We are already increasing headcount, we have some strong deals in the pipeline and the user feedback is consistently good. We hope and believe that with the right determination and focus that Gravity Sketch will continue to go from strength to strength.
