If brands want to sell products in the metaverse, there is a aspect that not all of them have yet considered: the representation of their products, necessarily in 3D. It was already not always easy to have beautiful photos for 2D e-commerce sites, which means that the step will be even higher for these environments. immersive. This is where Omi comes in, and its modeling tool. The start-up has just raised 6 million euros from Dawn Capital, Founders Future and several business angels including Alexis Bonillo (Zenly), Daniel Marhely (Deezer) and Laurent Ritter (Voodoo).
Created in early 2020 in full confinement, this young shoot offers brands the opportunity to model their 3D products, then to create “in a few minutes ultra-realistic visuals, where marketing teams still spend more than one day a week there”, compares Hugo Borensztein, the co-founder. He says he became aware of the issue of the metaverse after his almost six years as as Director of Southern Europe Operations at Facebook and Instagram.
“The Canvas of 3D”
Omi’s promise is to offer brands subscription-based software (SaaS) billed at an aggressive price (compared to the competition) of 225 to 700 euros per month. The marketing teams send their products to Omi, which takes care, via a studio equipped with 36 cameras, of transforming them into photorealistic 3D objects. In more complex cases, Omi uses iPhone 13 Pro equipped with Lidar lasers – reputed to be hyper-precise. And in rare cases, a team of 3D graphic designers models the products.
“The creation of visual content is a huge pain point for brands, the problem is that there is a lot of demand and little innovation,” said Hugo Borensztein. Once the 3D content is designed, Omi offers several types of integration: e-commerce sites, social networks and of course metaverse. In reality, the sector is still too young to include content in 3D convincingly. “On Decentraland, for example, the graphics are not yet up to par,” assesses the co-founder. But customers are polishing their weapons. One of them, a large Parisian shopping mall, aims to transform its shelves in 3D.
“In an increasingly content-hungry world, Omi is building the Can go [valorisé 40 milliards de dollars, NDLR] 3D for product marketing specialists. Their 3D models can be reused over and over again in a wide range of mediums and content, from photos and videos to augmented and virtual reality experiences,” says Dan Chaplin, VC at Dawn Capital.
One-click NFT
Another avenue of development is Horizon Worlds, the platform that Meta is preparing. The Omi team expects this environment to be very closed, and that only partners “on the list white” can access it. Hugo’s former attributions Borensztein should help the start-up find a place there. Moreover, it is already one of the five companies selected worldwide to support Instagram in the integration of NFTs on its platform.
Non-fungible tokens are the other part of the Omi offer. “Brands do not know how or do not want to create NFTs themselves, so we offer them to transform their 3D products into tokens in one click”, explains the manager. No “wallet” to create or “mint” to launch on a specialized platform, Omi is the intermediary – and charges the operation a little more expensive.
No car or luxury
The young shoot has 200 references, including the food supplement start-up Feed, the nail polish brand Manucurist, Nestlé and a large French cosmetics group. For two years, 3,500 products have been modeled at the rate of about twenty per year on average per customer. In the targets, Omi wants to avoid “too competitive” automobiles and furniture, luxury, “too demanding in terms of support” and clothing, whose 3D rendering is still disappointing.
With 15 employees and soon 35, Omi recruits technological profiles and seeks to cast a wide net in terms of customers, rather companies between 1 and 10 million euros in turnover and SMEs that want to “dusting off their image”. If the success is confirmed, Omi could experience the same fate as Vertebrae, a specialist in 3D product modeling, recently acquired by Snap.
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