Avataar, which helps e-commerce sites and DTC brands with 3D renditions of products, raises a $45M Series B led by Tiger Global
The vast majority of e-commerce customers prefer to preview the product before making the purchase. That's the reason why the likes of Amazon have historically struggled …
Context & Ripple Effects
Avataar's $45M Series B lands mid-wave: within roughly three months, Threekit raised a $35M Series B for 3D and AR shopping experiences and Soona pulled in $35M for virtual product photo and video shoots, making early 2022 the moment investors decided product-visualization tooling was a category rather than a niche.
Tiger Global is running the same playbook across the stack — it also led Depict.ai's $17M Series A for e-commerce recommendations weeks after this round — betting that whoever owns merchants' product-content pipeline owns a durable wedge into e-commerce. The bet aged well enough that by 2025 Avataar could point to HP, Victoria's Secret, and Lowe's using its Velocity video-generation tool.
First-order effects
- Avataar gets the balance sheet to scale 3D rendition production for e-commerce sites and DTC brands, while direct rivals Threekit and Soona — both freshly funded at similar stage sizes — now compete against a peer with Tiger Global's follow-on signal behind it.
Second-order effects
- Merchants gain negotiating leverage as three funded vendors chase the same product-content budget, pressuring pricing toward per-SKU or subscription models instead of bespoke 3D modeling fees.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, product imagery becomes generated software output rather than a photography line item — the trajectory Avataar itself followed from 3D renditions to the Velocity video tool adopted by HP, Victoria's Secret, and Lowe's — reshaping how brands staff and buy content.
The trend: E-commerce product content is consolidating into AI-generated pipelines, with Tiger Global placing parallel bets across visualization, search, and recommendations to own the merchant workflow.