Investing in Aino.ar

At FOV Ventures, we strongly believe that the Metaverse will revolutionize e-commerce and the retail industry. That’s why we’re super excited to share this journey with Aino.ar.

Since the early days of the Internet, shopping online has meant buying products from static grids on 2D web pages. Over time e-commerce stores added images, video, social, recommendations etc. Now AR and 3D are changing the way that physical goods are marketed and sold, whether that’s virtual try-on or at-home furniture previews. It’s estimated that AR and camera commerce alone will drive $36bn in commerce by 2024.

We can identify several key technological drivers in this revolution of commerce:

Realtime 3D game engines

Thanks to advances in game engine technology, you can now render photorealistic spaces, in realtime, in-browser (not possible until very recently). Most people have had the experience of using something like the IKEA kitchen configuration. These are broken and built on technology from a decade ago. Aino are coming at the problem having a strong background in modern gaming technologies.

Digital twins

An end user can now create a digital twin of their own space within minutes using an iPhone (Apple’s RoomPlan SDK). Long term one can imagine everyone having a digital twin of their home. This becomes the layer in which you visualise and make purchasing decisions for everything in your home (vs Google or traditional websites)

Generative AI and easier 3D asset creation

3D asset creation pipelines are now cheaper/easier/faster and many more manufacturers/companies have digitised their inventory. On top of that generative AI allows you to easily create/change/customise objects, textures and surfaces.

Over the years we’ve seen a lot of companies tackling this problem space before, but we think there’s now a perfect storm of technical unlocks that results in a 10x better product. Aino.ar takes center stage in this thesis, and we are thrilled to accompany them on their quest to revolutionize the way products and spaces are designed and viewed.