The following interview is a conversation we had with Christian Stein, CEO & Co-Founder of Threedy, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $11.5M Raised to Power the Future of Industrial 3D Computing Infrastructure
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey everyone. And welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Christian Stein, CEO and Co-Founder of Threedy, an industrial 3D platform that’s raised 11.5 million in funding. Christian, welcome to the show.
Christian Stein
Hi Brett, nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Let’s go ahead and jump right in. Talk to us about what you’re building there at Threedy.
Christian Stein
Yeah, it’s going to be a little complex I guess. So what we’re building is a visual computing infrastructure. That’s what we like to call it. So it’s a middleware that industrial customers use to enable the development of fast and scalable industrial 3D and mixed reality applications.
Brett
How do you get into this world? I would have to imagine this isn’t some random problem that you stumbled on in your normal day to day life. What were you doing in your day to day life that you uncovered this problem?
Christian Stein
Actually I have a history as a computer scientist working a lot with computer graphics software engineering, did my first steps in the games industry and then by chance decided to master and joined the Fraunhofer research organization. And yeah, this kind of result of the topics that I was working on there, that we decided to build a new platform solution and were surprisingly successful with it. So that we at the end spun out the company of the research institute four years ago.
Brett
What was that like? You know, take us back four years ago. What did the first, you know, six months look like?
Christian Stein
The first six months, I guess surprising. All the different things you need to take care of. There’s a few things that are very special about the company. So we had a preparatory phase where roughly four years, went through a lot of different programs before actually spinning out the company with all the, yeah, let’s say legal restrictions and all the different stakeholders that need to be satisfied. So at the end we start the company by transferring the full department of roughly 20 people into the company and then suddenly there are so many new things you need to take care of that. Previously the head organization had done And I was actually becoming a father for the first time right at the same point in time. So just overwhelming things to take care of and totally different from what you had expected, actually.
Brett
I guess I had our first child about seven months ago, and I had started a new company four months before that. I don’t advise that to anyone listening. And I’m guessing you may have a similar position there that starting a company and starting a family or raising a kid is not easy to do.
Christian Stein
Yeah, yeah, I actually did the mistake twice because we raised the series A in December 2023 and two months before I got my second daughter. So I’m not learning from it.
Brett
Just never learned. You never learn. Now, when did you get your first paying customer? How long did that take?
Christian Stein
Yeah, I guess that’s the same thing. So we actually got the first paying customer roughly four years before we founded the company, which was also kind of the trigger to decide that, hey, we got something here. We should really think about what we can do with it outside of the research environment. And the core of founding the company was also to transfer these initial customers to the company with respect to existing contractual obligations with our research mother, et cetera. Mm.
Brett
Got it. Makes sense. Now, what about your market category? When it comes to the market category, is it industrial 3D or what’s the market category there?
Christian Stein
Yes, it’s industrial 3D, I guess. But I think the core part about industrial 3D is that while in the past, maybe utilization of complex heavyweight industrial data was mostly all about engineering and design, today there’s a rising demand of utilizing that data all across the organization and downstream along, let’s say, the whole product life cycle of the physical products that are manufactured. And this has changed a lot the way how important 3D data is becoming for all these different departments and people.
Brett
How do you think about the competitive landscape? You know, for those listening in who aren’t from the space, which is probably most people listening in, how do you think about the competitive landscape?
Christian Stein
I think what’s totally unique about us is how we build our core technology. And if you think about 3D data, there’s typically two patterns, which is people build software that kind of generates images on a server side and then streams images to the client, abstracting about data size distribution, et cetera, on that way. Or three, data is utilized by exporting it from complex management systems, by converting it, by reducing it to match the capabilities of an application of an end user device. And here’s exactly where we differ, that what we did roughly 10 years ago is starting to think about how we think that data should be utilized in a modern software world where data is typically progressively streamed based on user demands, based on interactions in the application.
Christian Stein
And obviously Threedy is a lot different than your standard 2D information that we consume every day. So our approach was to kind of rethink how standard algorithms are working and if we do the paradigm shift to think that we’re always connected, we can distribute workload between client and server, then we can kind of redesign standard algorithms to work in an always connected world a little bit better than these approaches.
Brett
When were chatting in the pre interview, I know you mentioned you’re not the go to market guy, but I do have a few go to market questions. When it comes to go to market strategy, can you paint a picture for us of what it looked like early on and then how it’s evolved and what it looks like today?
Christian Stein
Yeah, I think the core challenge growing out of this research is that you typically work with these early innovators and the people who kind of build innovative solutions at these large customers, like in the German automotive and coming out of the institute, I think we thought that it’s going to be very easy to replicate that way of finding these people. And then once we are established inside the company, we can very much grow with the number of applications that are built on top of our APIs. And when we hire the first guys for the sales to go out and share the vision and sell the technology, I guess we overburdened them with the complexity of talking to different ICPs, of delivering, let’s say the full story and kind of going into detail on all the different aspects and possibilities.
Christian Stein
And the core learning there, I guess, was that over the first years now we kind of stripped it down into different core use cases, into sweet spots where we can deliver very strong values and where we now 10 sports. Yeah, having our salespeople work on very specific topics, specific core customers, and a lot more successful with that as you.
Brett
Reflect on this journey. What was the most important go to market decision that you made and take us back. You know, how’d you make that decision?
Christian Stein
Difficult question. I’m not sure that there was this one decision. I think that the important decision was who to hire, like which kind of person, which kind of technological foundation to kind of take this burden that I just mentioned and break it down into something more scalable and handleable by, let’s say, your regular sales guy. And this was not so much a decision, but rather maybe a step by step learning on how to improve on that. So I think this brought us to a certain point and then the next important decision, I guess was as part of the Series A, that we decided to restructure the whole commercial side of the company and get a very senior expert on board who can handle this and bring the company to the next level.
Christian Stein
So I think the core decision was understanding and accepting that given all the understanding that we might have as a Founder, there’s a point in time when other expertise is also required.
Brett
What did you learn from building out that go to market team? I know that’s one thing that a lot of founders I speak to really struggle with. What did you learn from that process?
Christian Stein
I think it’s about structuring your sales organization. For me, as a technical guy, at least the same way that you would build your software, you need all these small parts that fit into each other. You need to have very clear understanding on how your processes should be structured, how the information flows, where, which kind of departments should be involved. So really building a machine that continuously optimizes the way it works. On the sales problem, let’s talk a.
Brett
Little bit about fundraising. So I know you’ve mentioned some rounds there a few times. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Christian Stein
I think also the first seed fundraising was very different from the Series A. Obviously at that point in time, given the technological state and already a number of customers lined up, I guess raising the seed round was rather easy for the Series A. I think the big learning is it’s all about timing and messaging. We did probably a huge mistake by deciding to delay the fundraising for six months. While we are right in the middle of the metaverse hype, which obviously given our core topic, Threedy was right playing into our cards. But then we missed the hype cycle and into the declining economy. It was very difficult I guess to find out what was the right amount to look for.
Christian Stein
And also given the very different maturity of the business, I guess from a product versus from a commercial perspective, what are the different proof points that we need to deliver to get the deal to closing at the end. So there was a lot of recalibration and while at the same time the environment was drastically changing quarter by quarter. And I think looking forward the next time we’ll definitely try to prepare maybe and the decisions and process for a longer time and make sure that the timing is not so bad.
Brett
At the time of this recording, it’s January 16th, so 2025 is underway. What do you have in terms of priorities? What are some of those top priorities that you have for the year?
Christian Stein
Given that we have this historic core of the business with the German automotive and how economy is looking for them right now and for the supplier networks, we decided that the core strategy focus for this year should be to win new logos outside of automotive and do our first internationalization. And we’re looking for first customers in the US and India here and at the same time extend on our partner network who are using our technology as a foundation to bring their own 3D and mixed reality applications to the next level. And I think it’s going to be all about kind of seeding the market for growth outside of the automotive there.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out here. Big picture. So let’s go three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like?
Christian Stein
I guess for us it’s very clear that the same way that over the past two decades maybe the Internet has become an everyday tool that you use on every device and anywhere, we think that the same is going to be true for 3D data and especially also for mixed reality applications and AI. And we see our technology there actually as a very unique foundational part on how interfacing with 3D data can work at scale for distributed industrial environment. So I think that chances are continuously growing for us and especially one of our core concepts of putting a data space into the center and moving away from files to APIs on shared spaces is something that is going to be very valuable in building these industrial applications of the future.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense and certainly love that vision. We’re going to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should we send them? Where should they go?
Christian Stein
LinkedIn. Or you can actually put my email somewhere if you like. Always happy to talk to someone who’s interested in what we’re doing.
Brett
We’ll spare you. We have some guests who sometimes share their email there and they end up with a lot of spam from listeners, so we’ll save you there. LinkedIn’s probably your safest bet.
Christian Stein
Okay, sounds good.
Brett
Amazing, man. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, especially given I know it’s late there in Germany, so really appreciate it. Really fun conversation.
Christian Stein
Thanks, Fred. Thanks for having me. Bye. Bye.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a P2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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