Get to know Jordan Taylor; he is the founder of Vizcom, a software company that helps industrial designers do their jobs better and more efficiently. Vizcom’s industrial design software enables designers to use natural language commands to create realistic visual renderings of their ideas and then explore limitless variations to quickly find the best one.
“Something that used to take three hours will take three to five seconds,” Taylor told Forbes. Prior to starting his company in 2021, Taylor worked at Nvidia as an industrial designer. He launched his company with a few million dollars in funding and no marketing from his living room. However, in no time, he gained big-name customers, including Ford and New Balance, for his industrial design software.
Working on his own projects was when Taylor got the idea to found Vizcom. Photoshop was his go-to for drawing, but it was a pain to color by hand every time he modified a design. With technology advancing at such a quick pace, he reasoned, surely there must be an improved method. He then called his friend and now cofounder Kaelan Richards and spoke with him about his idea. The two left their jobs and started working on Vizcom from Taylor’s living room.
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Taylor subsequently got into the first cohort of the AI Grant accelerator where he used his YouTube skills to make demos of his product for people to see.
In April 2023, Ford became one of Vizcom’s first enterprise clients after a member of its digital R&D team noticed Vizcom’s Instagram posts and reached out. In November, New Balance also became a customer.
The company now has dozens of enterprise and monthly-paying individual professional users. The California-based Vizcom is also moving beyond its bootstrapped days, Forbes said. The company recently raised $20 million, led by Index Ventures, to expand R&D, increase hiring, and set up a marketing team.
The funding brings the total investment to just under $26 million at a valuation of $100 million, according to Forbes. The company’s revenue is in the single-digit millions.
“The progress is beyond what I originally intended,” Taylor told Forbes. “I didn’t really even understand what it meant to be a company.”
“We’ll be significantly expanding our product development efforts, adding even more capabilities to enhance every stage of the design process. From turning simple sketches into photorealistic renders to creating bespoke custom models to integrating with 3D modeling and printing – we’re building an end-to-end platform that will take designers from initial concept to physical prototype faster than ever before,” Vizcom said in a statement.
