Paris-based AI visuals generation startup Omi is announcing that it’s raised €13m to develop its product and go-to-market strategy, as it looks to cash in on booming interest around generative AI tools for businesses.
The round was led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Founders Future and other angel investors, including Paul Robson, former international president at Adobe.
Omi — which was founded in 2020, before the ChatGPT-fuelled AI hype frenzy — has built a product that helps companies and brands create 3D visual assets, in both still and video, using a mix of third-party GenAI models and its proprietary technology.
Creating a consistent stream of visual content is something that cofounder and CEO Hugo Borensztein — formerly a sales exec at Meta who launched the company with his brother and CTO Paul Borensztein — describes as a “massive pain” for brand-led businesses.
“Visual content is like your electricity when you’re a brand. If you don't produce content, you just run out of power and you stop existing. We really enable big teams to serve that need,” he tells Sifted.
Omi says that 600 brands — including big names like Clarins, Nestle and Meta — are paying for its technology. While it won’t give concrete figures, Borensztein says it’s “experiencing 4x year on year customer growth.”
The tech
The startup bears some similarities to its Parisian neighbour PhotoRoom — which is generating €50m in ARR — in that it uses GenAI image creation technology to allow users to automatically create artificial backgrounds for product photos; creating 3D imagery makes Omi different..
“We picked 3D when most of the other competitors picked 2D. So we turn the physical products into 3D models,” says Borensztein.
The startup uses third-party image generation models Stable Diffusion and Blender together with its tech — which ensures that tiny details like reflections and shadows are accurate from every angle.
“The big edge that we have is the rendering engine that we've built,” says Borensztein. “You have all the angles, you can move it around, you have the reflection, you have the shadows, we have all of that.”
Omi can turn its customers’ products into 3D models in two ways. 2D photos are sent for more simple items, like a tube of cosmetics. Or, its "3D artists" personally scan the physical items and model on Omi's platform.
Building the business
Borensztein says it will spend half of the fresh capital from its fundraise on hires to improve the product, and half on scaling up its go-to-market strategy, particularly in the UK and the US. Omi employs around 45 people and he expects that to grow by 50% this year.
Investing in the product team — and particularly in machine learning and AI specialist hires — will be important for Omi, as more startups pop up offering GenAI image creation tools.
“Now we see little Omis launching every week, all over the place. They've understood that the 2D space is very crowded, so everyone is going for 3D,” says Borensztein. “We want to make sure we stay ahead.”
But while the competition is hot, so is the temperature of the market; Swedish fintech scaleup Klarna last month cited AI image production as a big reason it was able to cut its marketing agency spend by 25%.
Omi is working on building a product that’s great at making 3D imagery and video and fits seamlessly into marketers’ workflows.
Borensztein admits that Omi’s work is impacting creative studios — and that those kinds of companies will have to move fast to react to the new AI economy.
“Creative agencies, production agencies — they need to really move into the most creative pieces of content like the branding and strategy. Not the back shots, the banners, the posts for Instagram,” he says, adding that the kinds of people working for such agencies are already feeling professionally threatened.
“I get insulted on social media on my LinkedIn posts, I have photographers coming up and saying rude things to me — they don't like us.”
Borensztein says that while it’s a tough time for people in these creative industries, he hopes that technology like Omi’s will level the playing field for small businesses which are regularly charged “€20k-30k” for a short video.
