Furdo gives you a 3D preview of the home decor you want

Interior decorating your new house can be a tricky affair. It’s essential to have a clear vision in your head about the end results. Improper planning and hasty decisions might lead to costly mistakes. Even after careful planning, your home might end up looking nothing like you imagined. This Indian startup called Furdo, which launched yesterday, claims to have the answer to all your interior designing woes.

You choose a theme on Furdo and then submit your home’s floor plan. It will create a customizable 3D video of how your home will look like if it was decorated according the theme you picked. The video will give you a 360-degree virtual tour of the home, so that you can choose the design elements that you like and discard others.

All the products displayed in the video can be bought from their partner estores like PepperFry and FabFurnish. After the products are delivered, Furdo sends its team of interior designers to help you replicate the theme in the video.

I saw, I bought, I decorated

Kiran Singh, founder and chief design officer of Bangalore-based Furdo, conceived the core idea behind Furdo – that furniture could be sold using 3D visualization. He then roped in Arvind Prakash Singh (now COO) and Ishwar Sundararaman (now CEO) as co-founders. Bhavadeep Reddy, CEO of a real estate and housing firm called Indus Homes, angel funded the idea.

Sundararaman holds an MBA degree in marketing and strategy from IIM Bangalore. Since 2010, he has founded several startups, including popular mobile loyalty app Clubd. Prakash Singh co-founded Vrixx, a web portal for education institutions, in 2008. Singh specializes in 3D graphics and is the founder of Show Media Works.

Co-founders of Furdo: Arvind Prakash Singh, Ishwar Sundararaman, and Kiran Singh (L to R)

“The idea went through several avatars. After countless cups of filter coffee, the team brainstormed on the consumer offering, strategy, and positioning. The final result was Furdo,” says Sundararaman.

With its current team size, achieving a minimal viable product of good quality was a massive challenge for the startup. “Hiring was also a key challenge, but with our website up and running, people started understanding our vision and dreams. Things have gotten easier since then,” he adds.

Furdo plans to earn revenue by charging the consumers with a design and implementation support fee. It will also charge its partner estores an affiliate marketing fee for the products used in its designs.

“The design fee is INR 10,000 (US$157). The products in the design – wardrobes, wallpapers, furniture, and soft furnishing can all be bought from us. We collect the money from the customer and place these orders manually on our partner site, and deduct our affiliate margins. In future, this will be tech-enabled and more automated. The implementation support fee is INR 30,000 (US$471),” explains Sundararaman.

“Just on the basis of our early traction, we can confidently expect to design around 50 homes by the end of August. Assuming the average cost of decorating the interiors of a house is INR 600,000 (US$9500), we can register revenue worth about INR 30 million (US$500,000) by the end of next month,” he claims.

Furdo has raised US$400,000 as part of an angel round and plans to raise between US$5 million and US$10 million in its series A round soon. It’s also planning to expand its operations to six cities by the end of this year.

Crowded space