Product visualization startup Cylindo has raised $1 million in new funding.
CEO Janus Jagd told me the company emerged from his own struggles moving into a new apartment, where he and his girlfriend wanted to visualize how their living room would look with a bunch of new furniture. To do that, Jagd said he built a 3D room model on his own and gave it to furniture merchants.
Now, not everyone buying a new couch needs to go that far, but it’s still useful to have a high-quality model to look at when you’re thinking about buying furniture online. And Jagd said that Cylindo’s technology (which initially came from the games industry, where he used to work) is also being rolled out in brick-and-mortar stores, where there’s not enough room to show off the “thousands or millions of configurations” that may be possible when you take into account different colors, fabrics, and other customizable options.
Plus, Jagd said that for furniture retailers and manufacturers, Cylindo is “the only vendor where you can get all your visualization needs covered in one place” — yes, there’s the 360-degree furniture viewer, but also a customization tool called the furniture builder, and a room planner so you can see how that furniture will actually fit together in your home. (If you follow those links, you can try out demos of each product.)
Altogether, he said the product leads higher conversation rates (so a higher percentage of visitors will actually buy stuff), bigger orders, and a lower churn rate (so more customers will stick around).
Cylindo technology is currently used in more than 1,500 stores and e-commerce sites, according to the company, including Steelcase, Lovesac, and Gallery Furniture.
The new funding was led by Scale Capital, with participation from LiteCap and CommerceVC. Jagd said the money will help Cylindo (which now has offices in both Copenhagen and San Francisco) expand in the United States — and eventually, expand beyond furniture.