Latin American start-up, Spline, raises seed funding to provide designers, developers, and creators globally with an innovative 3D design platform
March 19, 2021
Spline, a professional-grade and web-based 3D design platform, raised a seed funding round led by NXTP Ventures, a leading Latin American early stage VC, alongside YCombinator, Chapter One VC, and several strategic angels from the global designer and developer community.
Spline was founded in 2020 by Alejandro León in Santiago, Chile, and has since expanded to serve tens of thousands of monthly users across the U.S. and internationally, only a few months after its product launch. Prior to launching Spline, Leon spent over 10 years as a professional designer and developer, having used many of the existing 2D, 3D and XR design tools on the market today and identified a ubiquitous pain point for millions of designers, developers, artists, and creators globally: they increasingly want to embed more 3D designs into web interfaces and applications, however the existing design tools are complex, expensive, and require multiple years of training and coding experience.
As a result, Leon launched Spline to provide designers globally with a professional-grade and collaborative web-based tool for 3D design for production use cases in large enterprises, small to mid-sized companies, and individual graphic designers. Spline provides an intuitive, no-code platform, leveraging a 2D approach that designers are already familiar with and use daily through platforms such as Figma and Sketch, and applying that simple approach to 3D design use cases.
“3D design has been historically complex and inaccessible for designers. Spline aims to fix that. But there is much more than making things simpler, the entire design process can change if you think and design in 3D by default.” says Alejandro León, founder and CEO of Spline. “The reception from the designer and developer community has been very strong as the market was looking for a tool like this for years.”, adds León.
“We are thrilled to partner with Spline in this first funding round for the company. Alejandro is a unique talent, and he and his team are building an innovative 3D design platform that is being highly sought by customers globally,” adds Darly Bendo, Investment Director at NXTP Ventures.
Since launching the product in late 2020, the reception and engagement from the designer community globally has been overwhelming as Spline makes building in 3D more accessible in their production environments. Only a few months after launching, Spline has already amassed tens of thousands of monthly users from around the world and is rapidly expanding its product offering and features for designers and teams on the platform.
Proceeds from the seed funding round will be used to grow the team and new hires, accelerate product development and new features roll-out, development of enterprise team collaboration, expanding into adjacent markets and use cases (such as gaming applications, XR, and 3D art) and general commercial expansion.
About Spline
Spline is a design platform that leverages an intuitive 2D approach to building 3D web-based designs in real-time. It enables the creation of real interactive 3D/2D content (not mockups or prototypes) compatible for production environments, with additional team collaboration features for interactive enterprise workspaces. For more information about Spline, please visit spline.design.
About NXTP Ventures
Founded in 2011 and based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, NXTP Ventures is one of the pioneers of early-stage venture capital in Latin America. We partner with high-impact, visionary founders early on as one of the first sources of institutional funding to help build their companies into market leaders with long-term competitive advantages. We primarily invest in Seed and Series A rounds in B2B companies, and our core verticals are Cloud & SaaS, logistics technology, B2B marketplaces, fintech, and information services. For more information about NXTP, please visit nxtp.vc.
Originally published at https://nxtp.vc on March 19, 2021.
