Alongside this year’s Silicon Gorge: Spring Edition we’re going to be publishing profiles of a few of the companies that have made it through to the heats. This week, it’s Kaedim, a company looking to provide a better solution to the laborious task of creating 3D assets.
Here to answer our questions is Kaedim co-founder Konstantina Psoma.
1. What does your company do?
Kaedim’s vision is a world where your creative vision can be realised without frustration.
Kaedim’s mission is to accelerate the 3D creative workflow by using AI to automate repetitive tasks.
Kaedim’s purpose is to enable creators to spend more time doing what they love.
We were inspired to found Kaedim because we experienced the time consuming, repetitive and boring work involved in much of the process of creating digital 3D assets and resolved to find a better way. We saw how the inefficiency of this process was leading companies to exploit consumers and degrade their brands to mitigate the risks of ever-growing production costs.
Our product is a piece of software, with AI at its core, that can synthesise and stylise multiple new digital 3D assets from a single input image. Initially we are focused on simple objects, such as buildings and props. This enables designers to quickly create hundreds of novel assets in their unique studio or project style and then polish the few that best suit them, allowing for rapid iteration and a better overall product.
2. What problem are you trying to solve?
The demand for digital 3D assets is growing every year, yet they remain unreasonably expensive to create.
The main reason for this is that the production process currently only scales with the number of designers set to the task. Designer’s time is expensive, and they have to start from scratch each time they need to make a new asset, even if much of the underlying work is similar to what they have done before.
The cost of games development is growing by 10 times every 10 years, a major driver being the cost of asset production. We know, from our research, that at least 25% of the costs of game production are directly related to the creation of digital 3D assets.
Studios currently are attempting to solve this issue in one of three ways: developing and deploying complex procedural methods for making assets, mass-hiring designers at crunch time, or purchasing premade assets from resellers or online stores.
None of these solutions are scalable or address the root cause of the problem.
3. What makes your solution unique?
At Kaedim we enable the creation of multiple digital 3D assets, in the studio’s own style, from a single input image in a fraction of the time it would normally take to produce a single finished asset. There are two parts to the product: the first is the core tool which can generate multiple digital 3D models from an input image in a generic style. The second is the stylisation tool which can learn from existing customer data and apply the studio or project style to any assets that are created.
By utilising the large untapped reserves of data held in company archives to train our algorithm we are building great defensibility around the core product. The more data the AI system is trained on and the more it is used the better it will get, further building defensibility through the network effect.
4. What are you most proud of so far?
We are proud to be members of NVIDIA’s Inception programme for AI startups, and to have reached the final stages of both SETsquared’s Graduate Acceleration Showcase and University of Bristol’s New Enterprise Competition. We’re super proud of the prototype we’ve built, which we’re using to gather vital feedback from potential users and customers!
5. How much are you raising and what do you want to use investment for?
We are raising £250k to grow our team and build our functional MVP. This will be primarily used to pay our team of engineers and technologists as we create our cutting edge AI systems which will be used in our product. We are also pursuing an Innovate UK Grant to part fund this raise. SEIS/EIS still available.
6. What tools/people/services/
Firstly, we would like to thank Andy and Male, our advisors for our Master’s project which this company is being spun out from.
A big thank you goes to the University of Bristol’s Basecamp Team who have funded our journey so far and are always helping us by giving us great feedback.
We would also like to thank SETsquared for the support they have provided with their seminars, experts in residence and all the opportunities provided through the Back Her Business programme.
Moreover, we are grateful to Dan J. Gregory for his continuous support and mentoring as well as for motivating us to stick with the journey throughout the ups and downs.
We’d like to thank Dan and Danny at Aardman for showing an interest in our project at such an early stage and for their ongoing support
Finally, we thank NVIDIA for welcoming us in their Inception programme, for providing us with technical support and useful connections within the games industry.
7. Where can we find out more about you?
If you are interested in what we do and would like to see a demo, contact us at admin@kaedim.com! You can find more info on our website https://www.kaedim.com.
We’re looking for creators from all industries to join us in discussion about the future of creativity, so if you’re interested in sharing your thoughts get in touch!
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