It’s the right time for Mod Tech Labs to move to Buffalo.
Before the 43North pitch competition, CEO Alex Porter didn’t know much about the Queen City, but she did her research to make sure her Austin-based startup and the local community were a good fit.
“Moving from Texas to New York is a big move,” she said. “It’s not something I take lightly, but I want this success for ourselves and for Buffalo. This is about bringing each other up and creating opportunities on both sides.”
Mod Tech Labs, which helps companies by digitizing the real world using photos and videos to create universal 3D content at scale, is one of this year’s 43North pitch contest winners. That means Porter and her husband, Tim, will move to Buffalo early next year.
In addition to winning $1 million in the 43North contest, Mod Tech Labs participated in the MassChallenge accelerator last year and has raised $850,000 in funding.
Since starting the company in 2020, the Porters have focused on marketing their artificial intelligence-powered platform to the entertainment and media industry. Good timing in the film market has helped their business take off, and they also think the timing is right when it comes to Buffalo specifically.
The startup will bring in about $3 million in gross revenue over the next six months, based on projects in its pipeline. Porter expects next year to hit at least $250,000 of recurring monthly revenue. The company has worked on high-end productions with companies including NBCUniversal.
Currently, the business model is mainly project-based revenue, but the founders anticipate moving into licensing for the platform as an internalized tool soon.
During the pandemic, the film industry shifted further to remote work and reorganized to boost productivity and efficiency, which lends itself to Mod Tech Lab’s technology. Digital content went from being about 30% to 80% of a given movie, according to Alex Porter. Meanwhile, there’s not enough talent in the industry to create that level of content at scale.
“With our automation process … you don’t have to have a super skilled artist or a team who has been doing this for many years to fully execute on content creation,” she said. “You can bring that technical bar really down.”
In Buffalo, the film industry has been growing and multiple studio projects are in the works, like Buffalo Studios in South Buffalo, Buffalo Film Works in the Seneca-Babcock neighborhood and Great Point Media’s site on the lower West Side.
Buffalo-area colleges also make the area appealing. There’s a huge film community here, and Mod Tech Labs wants to hire employees and interns who are talented and then retain that talent in Buffalo.
New York state is a good fit, too, because it has funding incentives that can be applied to visual effects, which Porter says isn’t common. Many states give incentives toward physical production only.
In a year or so down the road, Porter sees vertical growth potential in other industries like architecture, construction and medical imaging – anywhere where imagery data is used.
“The solution on the back-end is actually not that different,” she said.
