I first met Voxelo’s Vladimir Mulhem in December 2023, just as he was starting his startup journey. 16 months later, what he’s been working on is ready to be featured in PreSeed Now.

Are you ready to enter the world of Gaussian splatting?

But first:

• Manchester-based early-stage VC firm DSW Ventures has successfully closed its second SEIS fund, securing more than £2 million. Learn more about them in our recent interview

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– Martin

Voxelo wants to transform ecommerce… with Gaussian splatting

When Vladimir Mulhem first saw an academic paper explaining a new process called ‘Gaussian splatting’ in 2023, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.

Gaussian splatting is a technology that enables a new way of creating 3D graphic objects from real-life physical objects with far greater accuracy than previous efforts.

As The Verge recently noted:

What Mulhem is working on with his startup Voxelo, alongside fellow co-founder Ben McKay, is a tightly focused, practical, commercial use case for the technology: better, easier to produce, 3D models for ecommerce.

“We would like to make digital shopping more interactive, more immersive, through accessible 3D content creation,” Mulhem says, stating that 3D models on an ecommerce website can have a positive impact of increasing conversions, reducing returns, and improving user experience.

“3D has for a long time been inaccessible to most businesses selling products because of the cost of producing 3D assets… It’s high time to get into this world of not just images and videos, but 3D, to enable customers to visualise a product better.”

How it works

Voxelo’s software is designed to replace the need for expensive professional studio equipment or less effective tech such as the photogrammetry-based 3D mapping built into iPhones.

As an input, Voxelo just needs a normal video recorded via a smartphone or more high-end kit such as a DSLR camera.

A user can simply walk around an object (or use a turntable if they have one), shooting a video of it as they go for two to three minutes. They then upload their video to Voxelo.

“Our AI under the hood will separate the background from the object, making sure that the object that you're looking at gets picked out… Then, within an hour, you get a fully-interactive 3D model in our own viewer, which is hosted by us,” Mulham explains.

The user can make tweaks to the model if needed, and then easily transfer the 3D models into ecommerce platform Shopify for use as an interactive product illustration.

“The use case resembles other platforms that do 3D, but makes the production of 3D assets super high quality,” Mulham says.

Gaussian splatting is at the heart of these higher-quality models. Try to do something similar with apps that use the iPhone’s built-in tech, and you’ll probably find that shiny, furry, or transparent objects don’t turn out very accurate.

“The other part of this technology which is novel, is the way captures lighting. Reflection is dynamic. It will bake the reflection of the environment into the models so there's no further rendering required,” Mulhem explains.

The story so far

Mulhem has a long history of working 3D graphics technologies, in fields such as architecture. And in 2010, he co-founded an company called Creative Content Works, creating 3D product graphics for retailers.

“In my previous company, we got somewhere with the old traditional tech like photogrammetry, but when it comes to like high-end outputs, there's a lot of manual labour involved” Mulhem says.

“So we did what the iPhone does at a consumer level, but with DSLRs and robotic arms and things like that. But to get to this super-photorealistic quality, there's a lot of manual steps that people just don't see, and that's where the scalability just fails.”

As chance would have it, Mulhem had recently exited his previous business and was ready for a new challenge just as the potential of Gaussian splatting emerged in 2023.

And so he went into founder mode, experimenting with the tech while simultaneously building a network in the growing tech startup sector in his home city of Manchester.

Although they missed out on Innovate UK grant funding, the application process forced the nascent Voxelo to put together a business plan. In 2024, the startup was accepted onto the Turing Innovation Catalyst programme and Mulhem started to build out a team including further technical expertise, and marketing expert McKay who has joined as a co-founder.

Voxelo’s initial product has reached a stage where early adopters are testing it to make sure it meets their needs, while establishing signs of customer demand.

Unwilling to move fast and break (too many) things, Mulhem is reluctant to launch this MVP publicly yet:

“To have a minimum viable product that does this magical video-to-3D and does it well, it needs a level of technical build that's slightly above the usual requirement for an MVP… This is deep tech under the hood that needs to just look like magic on the surface. So it's a fine line. How far do you go building it before you launch it?”

A formal private beta is planned to launch in April.

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