What do Uber, Airbnb and a growth-phase virtual reality content facilitator for the furniture industry based in Winston-Salem have in common? They all can claim investment by Jason Calacanis, known as one of Silicon Valley’s foremost investors in innovative companies.
Now with Live Furnish completing a second round of capital raising that includes Greenville, South Carolina-based angel fund Venture South, the company has raised a total of $1.5 million as it looks to serve consumer products content creators in other industries.
Live Furnish moved to the Triad from San Francisco 18 months ago to better serve its Triad client base. Founded by Preet Singh, Live Furnish allows furniture companies to create virtual images featuring furnishings in any setting imaginable without the need for costly and time-consuming product photography or CGI.
Click on the images below to get a feel for Live Furnish's capabilities
Live Furnish product images
A pioneer in the space, Singh said the rapid growth Live Furnish has experienced over the past year-and-a-half is only the beginning.
“We are a content production platform that helps people produce beautiful images, videos, interactive experiences, and augmented reality experiences in a couple of clicks without any technical or design knowledge by being able to use 3D data effectively,” Singh said. “Whether it's social media, e-commerce or any kind of content distribution channels, we’re providing a next-generation 3D visualization and content production tool for companies to be able to produce content consistently with full creative control in house.”
Since moving to Winston-Salem as a one-man operation, Singh has grown Live Furnish to 10 employees based in the 500 West Fifth building in the heart of the emerging downtown tech and entrepreneurship ecosystem. With a firmly established customer base and what Singh said is a growth rate of 450% over the past 10 months, Live Furnish intends to invest the capital in expansion into other markets. He said the company is also soon to embark on its third round of raising funds.
“We're in a high-pace, fast-growth pattern,” Singh said. “The team is growing, the business is growing and the product technology is growing, so we’re scaling up now to build a large and powerful company that can really create a beautiful and very usable products.”
In addition to the Triad, Live Furnish now has customers on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in Europe.
“All the images that you see in places like Wayfair, Amazon or Overstock, whether it's a white background or beautiful room settings — or videos or 360 viewers — are augmented reality experiences for the home furnishing industry,” Singh said. “All of that is what companies can produce on our platform.”
Although it began with a focus on furniture, the technology can be applied to multiple consumer product makers, which can be particularly valuable in a time when the online consumer marketplace is accelerating rapidly in the wake of Covid-19. Singh said that although the timing was right for the Live Furnish e-commerce platform, the value proposition his product offers is built for success.
“We're engaging our customers really well now in terms of them being able to understand the value of how to embrace new technology, how to embrace the new way of doing business after Covid, which is moving more and more toward e-commerce,” he said. ”You need content to be able to sell online and you’ve got to show realistic visuals. If I come to you and I say you can save 70% in cost and 80% in time and do it digitally versus doing it manually, it's kind of hard to say you’re not interested.”
