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From Research Spinout to Industrial 3D Platform: The GTM Evolution of Threedy

Starting a company is overwhelming. Starting a company while transferring 20 employees from a research institute and becoming a first-time father simultaneously? That’s a whole different level of chaos. For Christian Stein, CEO and Co-Founder of Threedy, this was reality four years ago when he spun out an industrial 3D platform from the Fraunhofer research organization.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Christian shared how Threedy evolved from a research project with early paying customers into a venture-backed company serving German automotive giants—and the hard GTM lessons learned along the way.

The Unexpected Starting Point

Most founders obsess over finding their first paying customer. Christian had a different problem: Threedy secured its first paying customer four years before officially founding the company. “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,” Christian explains. “We should really think about what we can do with it outside of the research environment.”

This unconventional path created unique challenges. The company launch involved “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.” It wasn’t a typical two-founders-in-a-garage story—it was inheriting an entire team, existing contracts, and complex stakeholder obligations all at once.

The Complexity Trap

Coming from a research background gave Threedy strong technical foundations and early enterprise relationships in German automotive. But it also created a critical GTM mistake that many technical founders fall into: overestimating how easily their initial success could be replicated.

“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,” Christian reflects. “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.”

The problem wasn’t the technology or the market need—it was the messaging. Threedy’s visual computing infrastructure middleware enables “the development of fast and scalable industrial 3D and mixed reality applications,” but explaining this across multiple industries and use cases proved too complex for scalable sales execution.

Stripping Down to Scale Up

The breakthrough came from radical simplification. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, Threedy focused on specific, high-value use cases where they could demonstrate clear ROI.

“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,” Christian shares. The company reorganized around “having our salespeople work on very specific topics, specific core customers, and a lot more successful with that.”

This wasn’t about limiting the platform’s capabilities—it was about making the sales process executable. Rather than explaining the full technical architecture and every possible application, the sales team could focus on solving concrete problems for specific customer segments.

Building Sales Like Software

For Christian, the key insight was treating sales organization like engineering. “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,” he explains. “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.”

This systems-thinking approach to GTM required bringing in specialized expertise. The pivotal decision came during the Series A: “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 emphasizes the importance of “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.”

The Timing Mistake That Cost Millions

Threedy’s Series A fundraising journey offers a cautionary tale about market timing. The company had a decision point during the metaverse hype cycle—and chose wrong.

“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,” Christian admits. “But then we missed the hype cycle and into the declining economy.”

The six-month delay meant navigating a dramatically different environment where “it was very difficult I guess to find out what was the right amount to look for.” The company also faced the challenge of mismatched maturity—strong product development but less mature commercial operations—requiring constant recalibration “while at the same time the environment was drastically changing quarter by quarter.”

His advice for next time? “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.”

Pivoting Away from Automotive Dependence

With economic headwinds hitting German automotive particularly hard, Threedy’s 2025 strategy focuses on diversification. “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,” Christian shares.

The company is targeting first customers in the US and India while building out a partner network that uses Threedy’s technology as a foundation for their own 3D and mixed reality applications. It’s “all about kind of seeding the market for growth outside of the automotive.”

The Long Vision

Christian sees industrial 3D data following the same trajectory as the Internet—from specialized tool to ubiquitous utility. “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,” he explains.

Threedy’s approach 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.” It’s a foundational bet that distributed, API-first 3D data infrastructure will become essential as more industrial workflows incorporate spatial computing.

For technical founders spinning out of research environments, Christian’s journey offers clear lessons: simplify your messaging ruthlessly, build sales systematically, hire commercial expertise when needed, and don’t miss your fundraising window. The complexity that makes your technology powerful can be the same complexity that stalls your GTM—until you learn to package it differently.