This week, Radical Ventures announced our lead investment in Vizcom‘s $27M Series B funding round. Founded by Jordan Taylor and Kaelan Richards, Vizcom is building an AI-powered design platform that is transforming how industrial designers create and visualize physical products.
While software design has been revolutionized by AI-powered collaborative tools, physical product design has remained stubbornly stuck in the past. For decades, product designers have been constrained by fragmented workflows, juggling tools like Adobe Illustrator, KeyShot, Procreate, and Blender to bring concepts to life. The journey from initial sketch to photorealistic prototype has been time-consuming and technically demanding, requiring specialized expertise across multiple platforms.
Vizcom is creating a unified AI-powered platform that enables designers and engineers to develop, refine, and visualize physical products in a fraction of the time previously required. The platform amplifies human creativity by allowing designers to spend less time on technical execution and more time exploring bold ideas. Over 150 companies, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies like Ford, Target, Dell, Omega, New Balance, and Estee Lauder have adopted Vizcom to generate photorealistic product concepts at remarkable speed while abstracting away the complexity of AI.
The company’s platform serves industries where design is critical, such as automotive, footwear, apparel, and gaming, allowing companies to fine-tune models to their own design aesthetics. As customers use these customized models, they continuously improve, creating a powerful moat through data network effects and driving deeper customer engagement.
The company’s long-term vision extends beyond visualization to encompass the full product development lifecycle, including 3D modelling, material simulation, and manufacturability tools. Vizcom aims to become the Figma for the physical world, a single platform where designers can take an idea all the way to a finished product design.
Founded by Jordan Taylor, a former industrial designer at Honda and NVIDIA, and CTO Kaelan Richards, Vizcom has earned effusive customer praise for both its capabilities and the team’s exceptional product velocity.
As AI continues to reshape creative workflows, some of the most valuable applications will be those that go beyond automating tasks, fundamentally reimagining entire industries. Vizcom represents this opportunity, using AI to consolidate fragmented tooling, accelerate creative processes, and ultimately enable designers to bring better products into the world faster than ever before.
We are excited to support Jordan, Kaelan, and the Vizcom team as they build the future of physical product design.
Learn more in Vizcom’s announcement of the round.
AI News This Week
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Genesis Molecular AI Claims its Model Pearl Beats Alphafold 3 (Endpoints)
Radical Ventures portfolio company Genesis Molecular AI (formerly Genesis Therapeutics) announced Pearl, a generative foundation model that outperforms AlphaFold 3 in predicting how small molecules bind to proteins. As described in a technical report released by the company in collaboration with NVIDIA, Pearl achieves up to 40% higher relative performance than AlphaFold 3 on external benchmarks by uniquely exploiting physics in its architecture and training on large-scale synthetic simulation data. This approach addresses the scarcity of high-quality experimental structural data, with Pearl demonstrating the first evidence of synthetic data scaling laws in AI-driven drug discovery.
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Nvidia Backs New Data Center to Reduce Electricity Spikes (Axios)
Radical Ventures portfolio company Emerald AI is deploying groundbreaking software at Aurora, a new data center facility in Virginia developed by Digital Realty and Nvidia, marking the first commercial rollout of technology that adjusts AI energy consumption in real time. Emerald AI’s software intelligently shifts compute-intensive AI jobs across time and geography, throttling workloads when grids are stressed and resuming when demand drops. After months of incubation at Radical, the company announced a seed extension led by Lowercarbon Capital, bringing the company’s total financing to $43M.
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How Are Companies Using AI? A New Survey Has Answers (WSJ)
A Wharton School survey of 800 business leaders reveals widespread AI adoption and reported positive returns, with 82% of executives using generative AI weekly and 46% using it daily, up from 37% in 2023. Roughly 72% of companies formally measure ROI from generative AI, with three-quarters reporting positive returns. Professor Stefano Puntoni notes that while productivity improvements dominate current AI use, long-term value will come from creating new customer experiences, products, and services rather than simply cost-cutting.
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How Data Centers Actually Work (Wired)
A high-level refresher on how data centers work. When a user submits a query to ChatGPT, the request travels through authentication and moderation checkpoints before landing on specialized hardware, primarily in the form of GPUs (graphic processing units), which excel at the parallel processing essential for AI systems. GPUs are energy-intensive, with facilities housing hundreds of thousands of chips can require as much electricity as entire cities. Companies are exploring various cooling methods, from traditional air conditioning to liquid-cooling systems, and some are even considering nuclear power to meet energy needs.
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Research: Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulation (Stanford/Tsinghua)
Researchers have developed Ctrl-World, a controllable world model that enables robots to evaluate and improve their performance through imagination rather than costly real-world testing. The system allows robots to “imagine” completing tasks and generate synthetic training data to refine their own capabilities. World models can dramatically accelerate robot development by enabling faster iteration cycles and allowing robots to learn safely and efficiently from generated experience, not just real-world trials.
Radical Reads is edited by Ebin Tomy (Analyst, Radical Ventures)
