Within the last decade, nearly all industries have undergone a significant shift from 2D to 3D design. Whether you're eyeing a new car or a new pair of kicks, chances are the product, down to its minute details, has been spun into a three-dimensional concept in CAD design software.
And for the past ten years, access to that software has cost a pretty price and created an enormous market, with companies –like Somerville's GrabCAD and Cambridge's Matter.io and Belmont Technologies– vying to produce various compatible services for engineers and designers.
Montreal-born startup Lagoa, which opened shop in Cambridge just five months ago, hosts a ground-breaking offering that brings product design and visualization to the cloud – and potentially to consumers down the line. And with the company's announcement Tuesday of $5.3 million in new funding, led by Cambridge's Atlas Venture, it looks like Lagoa is destined to shake up the design and product scene.
"We allow people to collaborate in real time and create content within a web browser, without installing anything...From visualizing skin, lipstick and hair to cars and airplanes, whatever needs to be produced can be created with our software," the startup's Co-founder and CEO Thiago Costa told BostInno, adding that Lagoa's version was "really fast" and "much more modern" than comparable desktop software.
Not only does the cloud-based software allow for engineers to share product renderings with their customers and non-engineering coworkers like designers and marketers, it also allows people to play around with a number of different skins and settings to make the mockup all the more realistic. In other words, the software does not simply provide the visualization of the product, but it also builds the context in which a consumer would likely experience the product. (Check out Lagoa's awesome video below to see what we mean, or try your hand by creating your own shoe, like I did above, here.)
The latter opportunity to bring the "pretty mind-blowing" technology into the hands of consumers especially struck Atlas investor, Fred Destin:
Not only is it a hard innovation, but [with the software you] can publish a product all the way down to the user, and say, 'Come consider your product.' It can be pushed down into the hands of the consumer to interact with custom products and bring 3D products to life.
Echoing Destin, Costa posited that Lagoa's software will "allow for this gap from content created while designing the product and getting that product to the consumer directly to be closed."
The challenge will then presumably be scaling Lagoa's software into the massive market, which, as Destin scribed in his blog post on the investment, is "screaming with disruption opportunities (cloud, manufacturing on demand, 3D printing)."
The idea for the cloud-based design software first came to Costa in late 2010. He and fellow founders Arno Zinke and Dov Amihod then undertook the development of the company's cardinal rendering and visualization platform in 2011.
Since then, Lagoa has raised $1.3 million in seed in spring of 2013, and opened offices in Bonn, Germany and the Boston area, in addition to its headquarters in Montreal, employing around 22 in total. Hosting six of those is the Cambridge office, which focuses in particular on sales and marketing and headed up by industry veteran Chris Williams, who serves as VP of said department and was responsible for guiding the sale of Seemage to Dassault Systemes. Costa will also relocate to the Hub come 2014.
With respect to Tuesday's funding, it looks like the Boston branch will be seeing some more action: The newly banked sum will go towards augmenting sales and marketing efforts, said Costa. Additionally the funding will be put towards further refining the platform and rendering technology.
Including this latest round, Lagoa has raised close to $7 million. This relative newcomer to Boston's design sector will certainly be one to keep an eye on in the New Year.
