Meshcapade raises $6M to generate 3D humans

Matrix leads seed round to expand Meshcapade's market-leading AI solutions that transform pictures, videos, text, and sensor data into 3D humans in the SMPL Standard body format.

Meshcapade, a startup specializing in AI solutions for modeling, analysis and synthesis of 3D digital humans in motion, announced a $6M seed round led by Matrix with participation from a number of tech founders and investors, including Nate Mitchell (Co-Founder of Oculus), Matthew Ball (Author of "The Metaverse"), William O'Farrell (Co-Founder of BodyLabs), Andrew Hamel (Former VP Machine Learning at Amazon), Gary Bradski (CSO at OpenCV), and CLO, a provider of leading 3D clothing software. Diana Kimball Berlin of Matrix will join Meshcapade's board.

Despite the breathtaking progress in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, today's AI systems still struggle to understand how we humans move, interact with the world, and express ourselves.

Whether it is apparel, fitness, healthcare, gaming, AR/VR, or communication, nearly every industry must understand the 3D shape and motion of their customers and be able to generate humans in motion.

Meshcapade's mission is to make technology more human by building the "digital human layer" of the internet brick by brick, supporting all business applications that must "see" or generate humans. Building around Meshcapade's patented SMPL body model provides seamless integration of high-accuracy digital humans across all verticals. Through easy to use APIs and web-based tools, Meshcapade allows users to convert images, videos, 3D scans, motion capture data, text, and measurements into 3D digital humans. Meshcapade's goal is to build best-in-class foundation models for the analysis and synthesis of 3D human motion and appearance.

Meshcapade's instant-avatar solution takes an image or video of a person in any pose and any clothing and generates a precise 3D model of their body shape and pose. Since the output is in the SMPL Standard, it can be animated in any game engine, draped with clothing, or measured for fit analysis.

Meshcapade's products are powered by the SMPL Standard family of body, face, hand, and foot models, the only commercially available solutions for 3D humans that use machine learning to represent accurate body shape and motion. Trained on over one million 3D and 4D body scans, the SMPL Standard is unparalleled in its accuracy and compatible with all game engines.

Naureen Mahmood, Co-Founder and CEO of Meshcapade explains: "As our lives become increasingly digital, we have a growing need for accurate, scalable and portable 3D representations of ourselves in the virtual spaces we inhabit. Our technology is the de-facto standard for 3D humans in AI, with a myriad of companies already using SMPL. This funding round will enable us to accelerate our development of the 3D digital human foundation for every industry."



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