Infurnia – Design & Customize your furniture via 3D visualization technology

Founded by IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur alumni – Nikhil Kumar and Lovepreet Mann, Infurnia is a new-age furniture technology startup, offering a tool to customize furniture with best real-time 3D visualization.

Key Service aspects: –

1. Easy to control and manage, this cloud-based platform is capable of designing various parts of a home, does not demand any expert skills and accomplishes the task in the minimum number of steps possible.
2. Amazing rendering quality for designers to showcase design.
3. Access your designs and creation anytime with cloud support. New features added every week.
4. Multi-user platform to work on a single design. No need to buy the separate license. Pay on per client 
basis

Q&A with Infurnia Founders :

Ques: What are the upcoming features expected in infurnia’s furniture technology?

Currently, we are operating only in the B2B segment, where we are bringing a lot of innovation to the way rooms/kitchens are designed. Our current technology allows a seller to design a full 3D kitchen in under 10 mins with one of the best real-time rendering currently available.

As far as upcoming features go, in the Kitchen segment we are bringing Design to Manufacture tools which will allow sellers to generate directly wood cutting plans from the finalized designs while optimizing on the materials used. We are also introducing a remote design facility which allows a seller to showcase designs to their customers in 3D while sitting remotely, and then take their feedback to make customizations which the customer will be able to see instantly. We will also be expanding into the Bedroom sector in the next couple of months.

Ques: Who are the direct competitors in this field and global counterparts?

There are mainly established players like AREEDOCAD(Italian) for Kitchen software, KCD, autokitchen to name a few. The traditional software has five-six years old technology, and some of them has even restrictions such as multiple license required to access through multiple machines. Infurnia’s technology is cloud-based software which is distinguishing factor and there is no startup operating in this segment as such.

Ques: How different is this 3D visualization of the other software like Homebyme, easyplanner3D etc.?

The core of our B2B Offering is not just visualization; it’s more on customization while having a really good visualization. So when building the design From Scratch in 3D, it takes 5 to 10 minutes then customization takes place. Even in the “best-in-class” kitchen software “Arredocad” which is one license cost 1.5 Lakh, users have to manually adjust the breadth of each and every compartment. Our value proposition is in to provide a high degree of automation to this whole process when the designer change one thing and everything else adjusts automatically. It’s just a much faster way of designing.

Second best part of this software is that feature of live rendering in 3D. This software can directly be used in front of customers as it has a very interactive interface, on the contrary side when you see any traditional software they are more like derivatives of “AutoCAD” such 3D software built for designer’s to use in a backend. So the process flow goes something like this. So this whole process takes 10 to 15 days. It’s not just the creation of one design but the whole process takes quite a lot of time.

We were trying to give features to get things done in minimum time possible. So you can design a kitchen infrastructure in front of customer evading backend processes. Speed will be rendered not regarding only kitchen creation; but also in terms of expediting the design process.

Ques: What is the business model of “Infurnia”? What is the investment made so far?

Our business model is pretty straightforward in the sense that we charge furniture sellers for providing them the technology. The point where it differs from traditional software’s is that being cloud based, we charge them on a pay per use model. So a seller with low volumes can pay low, while a seller with high volumes will pay higher. We raised a seed round from “Idein “Ventures in January worth $160,000.

Ques: What’s your present Customer base and what are your plans you know to take it to the next level?

Currently, there are 8-9 potential clients we are dealing with and we have a target of increase our customer base to 50 Clients in Bangalore itself. We will be expanding into Mumbai in Mid June, and by October we will have the presence in 7-8 cities as we will be expanding to a couple of new cities every month after June. It will break even once we reach 200 Stores by October.

Ques: How different is infurnia’s software others who are providing users to create a same digital replica of their rooms?

The other portals which allow you to build a digital replica of rooms; do it by asking users to create a room from scratch using online tools, such that the room will look close to the actual room. What we do is that we actually take user photographs, and construct the room from them. Besides being more convenient to a user, this method also produces better results in most cases as our image processing allows us to calculate distances much more precisely than what the user will input from memory or guess.

If a user wants good accuracy with other portals, they will have to manually measure the dimensions of the wall, the window, the distance of the edges of the window from each corner of the wall, etc. While with us, they just have to take one photograph

Ques: How are the plans going on building expert team for marketing, sales and technology, post the funding round?

We are currently a 16member team, including 6 interns. We are only looking for a couple of people on the web development side, mainly for backend roles.

Ques: how did you think of this idea and what was the inspiration behind it? 

We had discussed a lot of ideas in the start, the first idea was mainly about visual education. Like we were’ thinking of doing something tying up with the schools, so went to “Nasik” to fetch some data, talked to quite a few schools, but realized that market doesn’t exist yet for the product we were planning to build. Since Nikhil’s family has a lot of background from furniture industry, our focus shifted to bringing 3D visualization solution for furniture design and customization. So, that was the actual start, when we began working on developing a niche and effective solution for this community.

Ques: What was the most challenging part of this journey for both of you?

I would say coming up with the product that actually fits the market and then framing up the whole business model around it, it does cost us some unaccounted iterations and time. At the core, we are tech people, so our focus was just building technology; soon we started realizing that technology without business is nothing. In that regards,   The biggest influence has come from Ashwin Srivastava from IDEIN Ventures. His valuable guidance in that particular regard is more worth than the amount that they’ve invested. Experience comes with learning and every single day we have improved and incorporated new strategies, now we are a mix of tech and business.

Ques: Any words of wisdom you like to share for new entrepreneurs?

Add value, solve real problems; innovation and market adoption of new product takes time to happen, so keep patiently striving through the problem; an understanding core team helps you sail through tough time.

The most important thing an entrepreneur can do before starting up a startup is to do a lot of research in the industry, come up with a product that is needed in the industry. As soon as you have a MVP go to the market, go out and get feedback. Do not wait for a perfect product to launch