3D graphics design platform startup Spline Inc. said today it has closed on a $10 million funding, which coincides with the addition of Android support, opening up its collaborative capabilities to millions of Android ecosystem developers.
Today’s Series A round was led by Third Point Ventures, which was joined by a number of prominent venture capital firms, such as Y Combinator, Gradient Ventures and Firestreak, as well angel investors such as Jorn van Dijk and Guillermo Rauch, who serve as the chief executives of Framer BV and Vercel Inc., respectively.
While the Series A round is a big milestone, Spline said the addition of Android support is the much bigger news, putting its intuitive 3D design capabilities into the hands of many new developers.
Spline is the creator of a collaborative, no-code 3D design platform that’s used by developers and designers to create 3D content and interactive experiences without needing to write hundreds of lines of code.
Using Spline’s platform, designers can create everything from 3D product designs and text, to 3D objects and entire virtual environments. It’s especially popular with games developers, supporting the design of 3D characters and maps, with numerous editing tools to ensure stunning realism. Some of its key features include 3D modeling that allows users to shape parametric objects and perform polygonal editing to enhance the look and feel of their creations, animation capabilities that bring characters and objects to life, material layers to fine-tune the texture of 3D objects and environments and 3D sculpting tools.
The platform also integrates a physics engine that enables designers to simulate how objects and characters interact with one another in their 3D environments. In addition, developers can fine-tune their game controls in order to streamline how users interact with their 3D designs. Finally, there are generative AI capabilities integrated into the platform, helping to inspire users with various suggestions for designing objects and characters.
Spline claims to be the first tool of its kind to enable no-code 3D design for Android applications. What’s more, its designs can be shipped to any Android device, including smartphones, automotive infotainment systems, wearable devices like smart watches and spatial devices such as virtual reality goggles and headsets.
The company’s platform has already been available to Apple ecosystem designers for some time.
Spline founder and CEO Alejandro León said that before today, Android developers only had one option for 3D design: game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity. But he said those platforms are problematic in many ways.
“It simply doesn’t make sense for a designer to learn how to use something as complex as a game engine when they’re trying to make 3D content for an app, so we figured out a way to fundamentally change this,” León said. “3D is the future for content creation. We strive to make it as simple and compelling as possible by giving designers the superpowers they need to transform ideas into production-ready experiences.”
In addition to bringing its capabilities to Android developers, Spline rolled out a bunch of new features for its platform that are also being made available to Apple developers. They include a new “Real-time API,” which makes it possible for users to connect application programming interfaces with variables, trigger events and actions so they can make changes to their 3D creations based on data coming through the API.
In other words, 3D characters, objects and worlds built using Spline can be made more responsive, based on user’s interactions. “Designers can create interactive experiences that rely on real data with authentication, and they can control when to connect to the API based on the event actions within a scene,” León said.
Other new capabilities include support for webhooks. With this, users can generate customized webhook URLs for each scene, which can be used by third-party tools to push events, notifications and data.
In addition, Spline said that by combining Real-time API and webhooks, designers can enable new “AI Experiences.” They’ll be able to connect with AI models and request information, then use that data to control the looks and feel of any object in a 3D scene, the company explained. For instance, it will be possible to create 3D objects that can react to text content supplied by an AI model, and create contextual user interfaces.
Third Point Ventures’ Dan Moskowitz said he was blown away by the way Spline’s tools simplify the creation of 3D objects, characters and worlds.
“The up-to-now standard 3D design tools, which first came out decades ago, are not approachable. They take a lot of time to get productive,” he said. “Spline’s early traction, and the novel use-cases that users are coming up with, show that it is changing the way people think about 3D and how 3D can add value.”
Spline said it will use the money from today’s round to support the ongoing development of its platform, with a particular focus on integrating more AI design capabilities in order to simplify the creative process.