Founder at Intangible
Bharat Vasan
Over 20 years ago, Bharat landed his dream job at EA, and spent the next 8 years learning the games business from the industry's founders. Since then, he has gone on to be a repeat founder with multiple exits (August Home, Basis), and deep experience in scaling technology businesses. For the past 5 years, Bharat was also an investor at The Production Board, a venture studio founded by Dave Friedberg, and backed by Alphabet, Blackrock, Bailie Gifford, and Allen & Co.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
Charles Migos and Bharat Vasan met as kindred spirits and veterans of games and technology industries (Charles from Apple/Unity, Bharat from EA). Charles had been tinkering with a new technical approach to make 3D creation dramatically easier and proven out the concept at his last job. He and Bharat saw an opportunity to address the limitations of 2D genAI models and build a solution that helps creative teams in film, games, agencies, events and more deliver outcomes at 1/10th the time and cost, with a 10x increase in output and quality. Bharat left his fancy VC job, Charles left Unity. And Intangible was born in early 2024.
Why are you excited about your company/product?
Humans naturally see and imagine their world in 3D. Communicating in 3D is incredibly powerful but creating in 3D is incredibly hard. By using AI to make a 3D creative tool dramatically simpler, we see an opportunity to expand the market beyond today's 50M creative professionals to a much larger audience, similar to Canva's journey.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
Building an in-browser, authoring tool for interactive 3D is a HARD problem. It requires engineering and design experts from AI, game engines, film creation, webGL/webGPU open standards, real-time rendering, and more. We've intentionally assembled a team at Intangible with exceptional technical chops and design taste that is rare to find. Our team hails from companies like Apple, Pixar, EA, ILM, Unity, Spotify, NASA and more.
What inspired you to start your business?
It's been a rough few years for our community - creatives in film, games and agencies. Business economics are challenged. Factory-style production stifles creativity. Layoffs abound. And yet, more content is consumed than ever before, and the knowledge amassed by professionals in these fields remains valuable. We wanted to use AI to enable smaller teams of creatives to have an outsize impact, with a tool that let them get their projects greenlit or start new businesses. Our expertise is in building technologies that enable creatives and it felt inspiring to us to be able to build our own great business at Intangible, while serving customers in industries that we are very familiar with.
Can you share a distinctive achievement or highlight from your career?
I once raised $450M in 20 months as CEO. What I learned from that experience is to not confuse venture market demand with customer demand and a real business.
What sets you apart from others in your industry?
At a product level, Intangible is the only application in the world that allows creation of entire 3D worlds, from just words, and go from prototype to final visuals. It's the world's simplest 3D creative tool. At a technical level, we use a sophisticated stack of knowledge graphs and LLMs, to deliver the ability to create and script entire 3D scenes for film, games, events and more -- without ever needing to learn to code or script. Unlike companies that started with a technology and began looking for a business to build, we started as people who come from industry and are focused on building technology that we know will turn into a real business with customers.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
It's hard for anyone with keep up with the newest in generative AI - founders and investors are no exception. Last year, we made a big bet to NOT to use venture $ to build AI models, and rely on then-nonexistent open source projects commoditizing closed models over time. Instead, we invested our efforts at the application layer, validating use cases with customers. It's been wonderful to see how both bets have paid off.
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
At Unity, Charles would see the Unity Editor get 10K daily downloads but only 7% retention at day 30. The other 93% were latent demand in the market that no product is serving, and the reason we started Intangible. Our goal to build the world's simplest 3D creative tool hasn't changed, but the available AI frameworks, from LLMs to genAI models to agents architectures have made an even simpler experience possible.
