Gravity Sketch design platform
Platforms like Figma have changed the game when it comes to how creatives and other stakeholders in the production and product team conceive and iterate around two-dimensional designs. Now, a company called Gravity Sketch has taken that concept into 3D, leveraging tools like virtual reality headsets to let designers and others dive into and better visualize a product’s design as it’s being made; and the London-based startup is today announcing a $33 million in funding to take its own business to the next dimension.
The Series A is coming as Gravity Sketch passes 100,000 users, including product design teams at firms like Adidas, Reebok, Volkswagen, and Ford.
The funding will be used to continue expanding the functionality of its platform, with special attention going to expanding LandingPad, a collaboration feature it has built to support “non-designer” stakeholders to be able to see and provide feedback on the design process earlier in the development cycle of a product.
The round is being led by Accel, with GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) and previous backers Kindred Capital, Point Nine, and Forward Partners (all from its seed round in 2020) also participating, along with some high-profile individual investors, including Will Smith (Dreamers VC), Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman (Thirty Five Ventures), Soleio (famed as the “Like button” designer) and Paul Robson (Adobe’s head of international). The startup has now raised more than $40 million.
Gravity Sketch was co-founded by Oluwaseyi Sosanya (CEO), Daniela Paredes Fuentes (CXO) and Daniel Thomas (CTO). Sosanya and Fuentes met when they were both doing a joint design/engineering degree across the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in London. They also went on to work together in industrial design at Jaguar Land Rover. Across those and other experiences, the two found that they were encountering the same problems in the process of doing their jobs.
Much design in its earliest stages is often still sketched by hand, Sosanya noted, “but machines for tooling run on digital files.” That is just one of the steps when something is lost or complicated in translation: “From sketches to digital files is a very arduous process,” he said, involving perhaps seven or eight versions of the same drawing. Then technical drawings need to be produced and then modeling for production, all complicated by the fact that the object is three-dimensional.
Gravity Sketch design platform
