Loom.ai, the provider of best-in-class mobile solutions for building and animating personalized, 3D avatars at scale, today announced a $3M seed investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The new funding will be used to fuel recruiting, additional partnerships and the continued development of its fully embedded SDK solution.

“We will immediately ramp up our recruitment efforts to attract the world’s top talent in deep learning and computer vision to join our journey. Augmented Reality experiences built with Loom.ai’s personalized 3D avatars will unlock new mediums of communication, entertainment, and e-commerce.”

“We are incredibly proud of our partnership with Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. This strategic investment represents an important step in our growth as a company,” said Mahesh Ramasubramanian, co-founder and CEO of Loom.ai. “We will immediately ramp up our recruitment efforts to attract the world’s top talent in deep learning and computer vision to join our journey. Augmented Reality experiences built with Loom.ai’s personalized 3D avatars will unlock new mediums of communication, entertainment, and e-commerce.”

“Loom.ai is at the forefront of visual communications, changing the way we represent our digital persona to share and interact with one another through unique and individualized 3D avatars,” said Jihong Kim of Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. “We see huge potential for Loom.ai’s technology on millions of mobile devices worldwide.”

Digital media executive David Anderman and Stanford Professor Jeremy Bailenson have also joined the company’s advisory board. Anderman, formerly Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel at Lucasfilm, has spent decades leading business strategy and deal making at the intersection of technology, media and entertainment. Bailenson is the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, where he studies the psychology of Virtual Reality (VR), and is an expert in how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others.

Founded by Academy Award-winning visual effects veterans from DreamWorks and Lucasfilm, Loom.ai combines deep learning, computer vision and visual effects to connect people through the creation and sharing of digitized human faces. Loom.ai transforms users into their 3D, expressive avatars and allows for the real-time animation of their movements through the device’s camera.

Samsung Venture Investment Corporation joins previous Loom.ai investors including DHVC, Dentsu Ventures, Zach Coelius’ AngelList syndicate, GREE VR Capital, Presence Capital and Anorak Ventures, bringing the total capital raised to date to $5.85M.

Recently, Loom.ai announced a partnership with Samsung to power AR Emojis – fully customizable, personalized, 3D avatars – on the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices. To learn more about Loom.ai and licensing its technology stack visit Loom.ai.

About Loom.ai

Loom.ai is enabling a new era of virtual communication through the creation, animation and sharing of personalized, 3D avatars. Based in San Francisco, and an alumni of the Y Combinator Fellowship, the Academy Award-winning team has created a best-in-class solution powered by deep learning, computer vision and visual effects.

In just seconds, Loom.ai can take a single photograph and transform it into a fully representative, 3D avatar as personalized as the individual by recognizing the many nuances that make each face unique. Animatable and expressive in real-time, these avatars can be used to power current and future applications in mobile messaging, entertainment, AR/VR, e-commerce, video conferencing, broadcasting and more. For more information, visit www.loom.ai.

About Samsung Venture Investment Corporation

Samsung Venture Investment Corporation manages investment and investment-related activities for Samsung affiliate companies. The investment mandate for Samsung Venture Investment Corporation tracks closely to the strategic priorities of Samsung affiliate companies’ core operating divisions, and encompasses investments in semiconductors, displays, telecommunications, and consumer electronics.