Meet Jordan Taylor, the founder of Vizcom, a software startup that enhances industrial designers’ productivity. Vizcom’s industrial design software allows designers to use natural language commands to produce realistic visual renderings of their concepts, which can then be explored in infinite versions to swiftly 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.
Taylor came up with the idea for Vizcom while working on his own projects. Photoshop was his preferred drawing tool, but coloring by hand every time he changed a design was inconvenient. With technology growing at such a rapid pace, he reasoned that there must be a better technique. He immediately called his friend and cofounder, Kaelan Richards, and told him about his concept. The two quit their jobs and began working on Vizcom from Taylor’s living room.
Taylor later joined the inaugural cohort of the AI Grant accelerator, where he leveraged his YouTube skills to create samples of his product for others to see.
Ford became one of Vizcom’s first enterprise clients in April 2023, after a member of its digital R&D team saw Vizcom’s Instagram posts and contacted the company. In November, New Balance became a customer.
The company now has dozens of enterprise customers as well as individual professional users who pay monthly. Vizcom, situated in California, is likewise expanding beyond its bootstrapped days, according to Forbes. The firm just secured $20 million, led by Index Ventures, to grow R&D, hire more people, and establish a marketing team.
Forbes reports that the cash increases the entire investment to slightly under $26 million, valued at $100 million. Revenue for the company 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.