In July 2021, Jordan Taylor quit his industrial design job at Nvidia to work on a project in his living room with a middle-school friend: Creating software that could help industrial designers do their jobs better and more efficiently. With no marketing and just a few million dollars in funding, Taylor’s startup, Vizcom, gained big-name customers, including Ford and New Balance, for its industrial design software.
Now Mountain View, California-based Vizcom is moving beyond its bootstrapped days. It said that it had raised $20 million, led by Index Ventures, to expand R&D, increase hiring and set up a marketing team. The funding brings total investment to just under $26 million at a valuation of $100 million. The company’s revenue is in the single-digit millions.
“The progress is beyond what I originally intended,” Taylor, who is 28 and also previously worked as a car designer for Honda, told Forbes. “I didn’t really even understand what it meant to be a company.”
The funding was “very competitive,” said Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, who led the investment. She said that Taylor’s youth and passion reminded her of other superstar young founders that Index has backed, such as Dylan Field, Figma’s now 32-year-old founder, and Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s founder, now 27. “He doesn’t know the ins-and-outs of building a company. That is teachable,” she said. “But the passion and vision and obsession with customers is not teachable.”
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Taylor, the company’s CEO, and cofounder Kaelan Richards, also 28 and the company’s chief technology officer, first met in fifth grade in the Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills, where the automotive industry is central to daily life. From a young age, Taylor was brimming with ideas. While still in school, he built car prototypes, made YouTube gaming videos (“I was super into building a gaming community,” he said) and started a business selling T-shirts and other clothes with graphic designs after his parents bought him a screen printer. “I know when Jordan has an idea, he’s onto something,” said Richards, who previously worked as a software engineer at mortgage giant UWM. “He’s always ahead of the curve.”
Taylor’s idea to start Vizcom came from his own work. He’d primarily worked with drawings in Photoshop, which involved a tedious process of coloring by hand each time you made a change to a design. He figured that with technology evolving rapidly, there had to be a better way. “I started to get a lot of insights into where AI is going. How could I make something that accelerates my own workflow?” he said. “So I called Kaelan and said, ‘I’m going to leave Nvidia in two weeks and live off my savings.’”
Richards ditched his own job and drove from Michigan to California. The two founders holed up in Taylor’s living room, designing Vizcom’s software and eating Costco hotdogs to save money. Even so, Richards burned through all his savings and moved back in with his parents in Michigan to cut costs.
Things changed after Vizcom got into the first cohort of the AI Grant accelerator, funded by Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, and Daniel Gross, an early investor in Stripe, Coinbase and Figma. It began the program in November 2022. Two months later, it raised $5 million in seed funding, led by Unusual Ventures.
Drawing on his previous experience making YouTube videos, Taylor made his own demos of the product, showing the firm’s now 4,700 YouTube followers how to turn a simple line sketch into a photo rendering with natural language commands and then refine the concept with a few clicks.
Ford became one of its first enterprise customers in April 2023 after a member of its digital R&D team saw Vizcom’s posts on Instagram (where it now has 23,300 followers) and reached out, Taylor said. New Balance signed on as a customer in November. “Over the course of 2023, we were so impressed by the tremendous amount of inbound they had gotten,” said Achadjian, who first met the founders when they were in the AI Grant accelerator.
Today, the company has dozens of enterprise customers, as well as individual professional users who pay by the month. As Vizcom increasingly adds AI capabilities into its software, these enterprise customers can incorporate the vast quantities of data they’ve got from previous product designs. It can, for example, pull details about product sketches, packaging design and brand imagery over the years in order to build custom models of that company’s aesthetic. Earlier this month, it also started to roll out new 3D modeling capabilities in the software.
Eventually, Taylor said that he hopes to be able to move directly from a rendering in the software to a 3D printer in order for the concept to go seamlessly from the designer’s head to a physical prototype. “I think one day you’re going to be able to upload a line drawing to Vizcom and a 3D printer goes off,” he said.
