The Latvian startup Design Scan has just secured an investment of €800K. The young company plans to make buying furniture online more accessible and convenient and to automate the selling and buying process with the help of neural networks.
Buying furniture and other design objects online can be tricky, and customers often cannot verify quality, as beautiful pictures do not always correspond to the furniture being delivered. This is where Design Scan comes in. Launched in 202020, the platform shows only high-quality furniture from different brands that are available in showrooms. Design Scan also makes it possible to contact retailers directly and put all your questions to them.
“We want to make life easier for a lot of people who want to buy and sell furniture. For the end-user, Design Scan is the furniture marketplace. It simply works like this – the customer visits the site, chooses an item, buys it and the furniture is delivered to his home. For our business-to-business customers – showrooms, art galleries, antique shops, and furniture makers – Design Scan digitize their stock, as well as manages logistics and payments, takes care of the customer service and marketing activities so that the information about the product reaches the target customer. All items that are currently available have been aggregated and are already being shown to visitors to the Design Scan platform,” explains the platform’s co-founder Andrey Kalijev.
For 20 years Andrey was the Managing Director of several companies operating in the fields of interior design, architecture, and renovation. The companies implemented a lot of projects in different countries as well as representing European and American luxury brands in Baltic countries. The idea of the Design Scan occurred to Andrey when he realized how much time designers and customers spend looking for the appropriate furniture. And when they finally find it, they are not always entirely happy with the result.
The first version of the Design Scan platform is now available. The second version that is currently under development will also involve neural networks: “Design Scan will be able to automatically categorize newly added products on the platform and create descriptions for them. Designers will be able to upload 3D rendering images onto the Design Scan platform that will recognize items in the interior and provide a choice of similar items that are available in stock. And last but not least, neural networks will make life easier for our end-users, because they will be able to upload photos and the Design Scan platform will find the exact item and lead to the seller,” explains Kalijev.
Latvia’s Honorary Consul in Belarus, entrepreneur Aleksey Savchuk has invested €800K in Design Scan. He commented: “I’m interested in information technology projects. Previously I have invested a lot in manufacturing, but I wanted to be a part of a scalable business. I really believe in this project, because there are no boundaries or hurdles to making it available all over the world. The furniture market is worth a trillion dollars and is the second largest offline retailing business sector in the world after alcoholic beverages. I believe in the Design Scan team and in Andrey’s knowledge, given his many years of experience in the industry.”
