Meshcapade – a startup specializing in AI solutions for modeling, analysis, and synthesis of 3D digital humans in motion – recently announced a $6 million seed round led by Matrix with participation from a number of tech founders and investors, including Nate Mitchell (Co-Founder of Oculus), Matthew Ball (Author of “The Metaverse”), William O’Farrell (Co-Founder of BodyLabs), Andrew Hamel (Former VP Machine Learning at Amazon), Gary Bradski (CSO at OpenCV), and CLO, a provider of leading 3D clothing software. And Diana Kimball Berlin of Matrix will join Meshcapade’s board.
Despite the breathtaking progress in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, AI systems today still struggle to understand how we humans move, interact with the world, and express ourselves. Whether it is apparel, fitness, healthcare, gaming, AR/VR, or communication, almost every industry must understand the 3D shape and motion of customers and be able to generate humans in motion.
The company’s mission is to make technology more human by building the “digital human layer” of the internet brick by brick, supporting all business applications that must see or generate humans. And building around Meshcapade’s patented SMPL body model provides seamless integration of high-accuracy digital humans across all verticals. Through easy-to-use APIs and web-based tools, the company enables users to convert images, videos, 3D scans, motion capture data, text, and measurements into 3D digital humans. Plus Meshcapade’s goal is to build best-in-class foundation models for the analysis and synthesis of 3D human motion and appearance.
Meshcapade’s instant-avatar solution essentially takes an image or video of a person in any pose and any clothing and generates a precise 3D model of their body shape and pose. And since the output is in the SMPL Standard, it can be animated in any game engine, draped with clothing, or measured for fit analysis.
Through Meshcapade’s breakthroughs in avatar-from-video, it is finally possible to synthesize 3D motion with nuanced and lifelike animations from two-dimensional visuals. Meshcapade’s products have been powered by the SMPL Standard family of body, face, hand, and foot models, the only commercially available solutions for 3D humans that use machine learning to represent accurate body shape and motion. And trained on over one million 3D and 4D body scans, the SMPL Standard is unparalleled in its accuracy and compatible with all game engines.
Since being founded in 2018, Meshcapade has become the trusted supplier of 3D human technology for over 100 customers in apparel, fitness, synthetic data, AR/VR, telepresence, and entertainment. And Meshcapade’s technology powers solutions for some of the world’s largest businesses including six of the top ten NASDAQ companies, academic research labs, and a vast network of startups, making the SMPL body model the de facto standard representation of 3D humans.
Meshcapade’s business customers depend on SMPL for applications ranging from clothing sizing and virtual try-on to synthetic data generation for AI training.
The company is based in Tübingen, Germany, Europe’s hotspot for AI research and innovation and the home of Cyber Valley. And in 2018, the founding team of Naureen Mahmood (CEO), Talha Zaman (CTO), and Michael J. Black (Chief Scientist) spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where Black is also a founding Director. And Mahmood and Black are pioneers in the space of 3D human body shape and motion, and co-authors of numerous scientific papers and patents in this area. In particular, they are creators of the patented SMPL body model technology. Black previously co-founded of Body Labs, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017.
KEY QUOTES:
“As our lives become increasingly digital, we have a growing need for accurate, scalable and portable 3D representations of ourselves in the virtual spaces we inhabit. Our technology is the de-facto standard for 3D humans in AI, with a myriad of companies already using SMPL. This funding round will enable us to accelerate our development of the 3D digital human foundation for every industry.”
— Naureen Mahmood, Co-Founder and CEO of Meshcapade
“Matrix loves founders that combine a big vision with technical depth. The Meshcapade team literally invented the technology that everyone is using in a space that will grow to touch all our lives.”
— Dianna Kimball Berlin, Partner at Matrix
