Synthesia cofounder Matthias Niessner has raised $13m for his newly launched startup, Techcrunch reported on Tuesday.
The Munich-based startup, named SpAItial, aims to produce models capable of generating fully interactive, photorealistic 3D environments from text prompts. This would mark a significant leap forward from current capabilities like OpenAI’s DALL-E or Stable Diffusion which focus on 2D images.
The seed round was led by UiPath-backer Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Speedinvest and several high profile angels like Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach and Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli.
Despite having only released a teaser video demonstrating text-to-3D room generation, the company has already garnered significant interest.
The team includes Ricardo Martin-Brualla, formerly of Google’s 3D teleconferencing platform Beam, and David Novotny, who led Meta’s text-to-3D asset generation project.
Niessner, a professor at the Technical University of Munich, is widely regarded as one of Europe’s leading researchers in 3D AI modeling. He cofounded Synthesia, the AI avatar startup valued at $2.1bn, in London in 2017 with three fellow AI researchers from UCL, Stanford and Cambridge.
He told TechCrunch his vision goes beyond creating static 3D worlds — he aims to ensure they are interactive and behave like real environments, a challenge he believes remains largely unresolved in the field.
The startup is up against competitors such as San Francisco-based Odyssey, a developer of AI video generation tools for the film industry, and World Labs founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Dei-Dei Li which is already valued at over $1bn.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/synthesia-cofounder-new-startup/
