Any designer will tell you: colour on a screen and colour on a product are two different things.

Any furniture retailer will tell you: people always struggle to visualise the product in their own home.

Combining the ancient (well, old) knowledge of these masters of craft is Viewa: visualisation software that renders products in your home and garden using 3D, AR, and a dose of gen AI for “stunning realism”, so shoppers can buy right, and buy once.

Meet the problem 

The elders among us (aged 30+) may joke about needing “the big screen” to make major purchases. But 80% of Australians are shopping on mobile.

Smartphones are bigger, cameras are better, wi-fi is faster. AR has been possible for a while. 

But its largely app-based deployment has hindered its adoption. In a major point of differentiation to clunkier competitors, Viewa is web-based - no download or sign-up - ready to roll as soon as the customer points their camera.

Remember the term “impulse buying”? Not in this economy. Buyers are considered, prudent, and knowledge-hungry.

They’re also extremely return-happy. 

QR-based, no quibble Amazon returns are great for consumers. But not for retailers across the globe dealing with hordes of “Amazombies” and “long lines, frayed tempers, and mounting piles of boxes and plastic waste”.

Meanwhile, Britain is in the grip of a returns culture disaster. In Australia, 30% of all online sales are returned. Of that 30%, 30% can’t be resold.

Returns are an essential tenet of consumer rights. But they also waste time, produce untold pollution, and hurt businesses’ bottom line.

Prevention is better than cure.

“Our mantra is seeing is believing. Confident purchasing = infinitely better experiences for the customer, conversions increased by as much as 94% for the retailer, and massively reduced headaches for everyone when buyers buy the right product, the first time.”

Meet the team

Before Viewa came into focus, CEO and founder Ed Sedgley was busy founding and selling a tech business, a data company (which became Trulioo, now valued at $1.7 billion), and a marketing agency (Just Click Here).

CRO and founder Kyle Young has 2 decades’ experience in sales and biz dev, and previously founded a billboard ad network, and a mobile digital agency (Mocom).  

The team has attracted a high calibre set of investors and board members, including James Neville-Smith, Nick and John Haddad, and Rich Wenzel (founder of Nitro Software - ideally placed to advise Viewa having taken an Aussie-built product to the USA). 

The ARt of augmented reality

Whatever your choice of screen size, “dwell time” on pages selling big-ticket items is a major factor in conversion. 

The longer a page can keep you engaged and informed, the likelier you are to commit. 

And AR is really influential. 

Bringing shoppers visuals they can trust, AR-enabled interactions show a 94% higher conversion rate than those without.

Like having a good salesperson in the room, Viewa combines 3D, AR and AI tech with a visual overlay to help sell the experience of the product.

It can literally “read the room”, scanning for colour palette, windows, and other furniture to define the style (e.g. Scandi, Minimalist, Modern Eclectic). 

It offers dropdown categories and product suggestions, offers custom colours and fabrics, then places the selected item in the room for viewing.

And the introduction of generative image-based AI to Viewa’s software suite will mean enhanced realism above and beyond any competitors in-market.

AR is a technology with limitless potential. But the key to monetising it is zeroing in on use cases people actually care about.

Because of its tactile, impactful, and often expensive nature, the home decor market is one of AR’s earliest and most prolific adopters. 

A step up from straightforward 3D modelling, ViewaSurface showcases wood, tile, slate, and stone in glittering detail, overlaid onto customers’ own photos to get them to confident decisions, faster. 

It can help them fit blinds and curtains, swatch fabrics, and project them onto windows using their smartphones.

And ViewaScenes showcases multiple products at once, in aspirational settings sales teams can build into proposals - think custom pools or bespoke kitchens. 

Future vision

If you hadn’t noticed, gen AI is moving fast, and Viewa will be one of the first to commercialise it (in true experienced founder fashion, Ed has hired a senior lecturer from RMIT on AI to take point on R&D).

Adding to an almost 50-strong list of customers (including Warwick, EC Carpets, Tumbled, and Shelta), furniture retailer M+Co Living will soon deploy Viewa’s AR software into over 100 Australian retailers.

Viewa will continue to work on its seamless customer experience, with testimonials already glowing:

"It's always been difficult to show prospective clients how our natural stone will look in their homes. Since we implented Viewa, customers are spending 5x more time using Surface than our other webpages. This is a key indicator of success as it means they're engaged and more likely to make a purchase. It's both a tool for website users but also for our sales team. We're finding that Surface is providing a strong return on our investment." - Sarah Wiese, Owner, Tumbled 

Trade shows have been massive for Viewa. Although the product is digital, it works with the highly physical - water features, decor, tactile furniture. And when people see it, they really believe in it (backed up by their running 23% lead-to-customer rate).

The founders’ extremely impressive founding experience aside, the whole team’s clear strengths lie with vision (no pun intended), and rapidly understanding new technology and how it applies to the market.

Viewa has a strong team culture and defensible technical skill, and we’re excited to back them on their path to international expansion