Physna, which aims to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital world by codifying 3D models, announced Thursday that it has raised $56 million in a Series B funding round.
The new funding was led by venture capital firm Tiger Global with participation of GV, the venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc., and Sequoia Capital. It brings Physna’s total financing to $86 million, according to the company.
The announcement comes just five months after Physna raised $20 million. Physna plans to use the capital to grow Physna Enterprise, its deep-learning platform and Thangs, its free geometric search engine which allows users to search, store, share and collaborate on 2.5 million 3D models. “We're going to mainly be using the funding to expedite product development,” CEO Paul Powers says.
Paul Powers, the CEO of 3D intelligence platform Physna, cofounded the company with Glenn Warner in ... [+]
Powers, a 30 Under 30 alum, founded Physna in 2016 after receiving a law degree from Heidelberg University. He had set out to create a software that could detect if someone’s intellectual property had been stolen. “There are already algorithms for plagiarism prevention for things that are text or for images, but that didn't exist for 3D,” Powers tells Forbes.
At the very beginning, telecommunications used the Morse code to process information in dots and dashes. Then came the binary code, the two symbol system that laid the foundation of computing. Physna’s software is analogous to what Powers calls “trinary code.” “It's a code that allows computing to happen in a three dimensional realm where computers can understand objects in their natural form without requiring human intervention,” Powers says.
Using advanced algorithms and complex mathematics, Physna’s 3D technology enables customers to detect different components of an object and locate other objects that might contain the same component. Using alternative components while designing a physical object can help save customers’ time and money, Powers says. It also improves design and quality control.
“So if you spend $100 million a year on procurement, about $40 million of that is waste because people have so many duplicate part numbers,” he says. “They don't realize that they get all these orders from the same company.”
Physna, which raised $56 million in a Series B funding round, plans to use the capital to grow ... [+]
Though Physna’s technology has more than 300 use cases across a gamut of industries ranging from retail to agriculture to architecture, the company is focused on automotive, aerospace, oil and gas and other key areas, Powers says. One of Physna’s customers is the U.S. Department of Defense and Defence Logistics Agency. “We actually have the largest 3D database in the entire department of defense,” he says.
The new investment will lead to more hiring at the 50-employee team at Physna, says Powers, who studied astrophysics at Harvard. The company’s long term vision is to create a platform for others to build upon using Physna’s technology. “So everything that we develop, we have an API (application programming interface) as well,” he says.
Citing the examples of Google’s smart eyewear, Google Glass and Apple AR glasses, Power says the next wave of technology will inevitably be more immersive. “But to be immersive, software has to have geometric and spatial reasoning,” he says.
Following cue, the company has announced Instant AR, an addition to Thangs.com, which will allow users to convert 3D models of objects into AR formats. It will also allow them to “place” the object in the real world by using a smartphone camera. “Augmented reality won't just be a gaming tool or enterprise tool for specific applications, it'll be very much augmenting your reality in a very real sense,” Powers says.
