TLDR: Bezi, a collaborative 3D design tool, announces its Series A with Benchmark and welcomes Chetan Puttagunta to the Board. More teams today are creating 3D apps and games than ever before but still face difficulty working together; Bezi offers a much easier way to work in 3D — and is hiring!

Where Are We?

The history of computing can be summarized into three pursuits: augmenting human intelligence, connecting with other people, and immersing ourselves in the digital world.

But what really is the “digital” world? Many of us already spend most of our time in it, whether it’s through apps on our phones, watching TV shows, or playing video games. Be it through a standard 2D screen or a more immersive 3D device, we’re regularly exploring a limitless creative world beyond our physical world.

One key medium to explore the digital world has been gaming. From Pong (1972) to Fortnite (2017), our society has grown to embrace video games from an arcade toy to a globally recognized sport. This year in Singapore, the IOC hosted its first ever Olympic Esports Series, a worldwide competition for virtual sports ranging from Gran Turismo to Virtual Taekwondo. For some people this may sound unusual, but for many, this is already commonplace in our lives, among annual events like the League of Legends World Championship. Needless to say, 3D games are becoming more prominent in ways unimaginable just decades ago.

Beyond gaming, we are also in the midst of a rare computing platform shift. This year Apple announced the Vision Pro, a long-awaited entrance in the spatial computing industry. It’s the next logical step in the evolution of computers, from the original Macintosh in 1984 which led the personal computing era, to the original iPhone in 2007 which led the mobile computing movement. Computing is shifting towards more engaging digital experiences, representative of the 3D world we physically live in.

A New Way

At Bezi, we believe that this coming decade will be marked in the history books as a time of incredible growth in the adoption of immersive, interactive 3D experiences. We also believe that the process of creating such experiences should be much more accessible and collaborative than today’s technical on-prem engines like Unity or Unreal. 

This is an urgent need that Cecilia, Denys, and I experienced firsthand at Oculus while building 3D software for the Quest headsets. The Quest OS contains a variety of immersive apps developed internally, so I often worked with designers like Cecilia to iterate on the product. But whenever she’d bring her Figma files to team meetings, managers would ask how they can experience the design in 3D before shipping to customers. 

The answer to that question would be something like, “Oh, I’d need to work with a Unity developer like Denys to script out an interactive 3D prototype in C#, duplicate the designs, export the Android package, then sideload it across remote devices…”

Bezi turns this multi-week workflow into a couple hours on the web.

Today we see thousands of designers using Bezi to whiteboard, design, and prototype 3D experiences. Check out this video from our recent design challenge! These experiences are often UI-driven apps or game prototypes that are shared not only cross-platform but also cross-device (desktop, mobile, headset) — all thanks to the web. Frankly, many of these experiences may not have come to life if the only available creative tools were technical game engines.

Next Steps

We’re excited to partner with Benchmark on this next chapter of Bezi and welcome Chetan Puttagunta to the Board. Our Series A is also joined by Uncork Capital who led our seed round and Designer Fund, as well as founders and design leaders from Dropbox, Notion, Product Hunt, Twitter, Mixpanel, Instagram, among others.

It’s been an honor to support the creative journeys of designers working on 3D projects, as well as those dipping their toes into 3D from 2D apps. Looking forward, here are some exciting updates to expect from Bezi:

• Easier, Better, Faster, Stronger: We’re committed to making it even easier to create and orchestrate 3D assets, as well as more advanced prototyping features to push the limits of no-code. Performance and security continue to be key focus areas.

• New Integrations: You’ve already seen Bezi’s integrations with Figma and Unity. There’s more coming soon to boost your productivity and enable your team to store the project’s source of truth in Bezi.

• Platform Ubiquity: We’re expanding on hardware destinations that can run 3D experiences made with Bezi, including the Apple Vision Pro. Each destination experience will play to the unique advantages of the form factor.

Try our free beta today at bezi.com and join our Discord to chat with our growing community of Bezties. If you’re interested in transforming the 3D world with us and making it more accessible than ever before, we’re also hiring.

Onwards!