3Kit

Ben Houston started 3Kit in 2012 as a visual effects supplier to Hollywood, working on major films. The real insight came from his prior experience at Big Machines and Steelbreak—companies that sold complex, configurable products. Matt Gorniak, the CEO, had lived this problem firsthand: "How do you sell complex products? That's kind of where 3Kit falls in." In 2015, when a couple of folks from Shopify joined the company, they saw an opportunity to bring this visual configuration technology to e-commerce. The founding insight was simple but powerful: customers don't just want to see a product—they want to see *their* product, with all the specific configurations they've chosen.

The platform itself was built 3.5 years prior to the interview (around 2018), though the underlying IP had been developing since 2005. When Matt and Godard joined, they decided to "scuttle" the old codebase and rebuild headless from scratch. The team grew from a handful to 120 people. Ben Houston stayed on as CTO and founder, bringing the deep technical knowledge of how to generate "picture perfect representations at scale." This was the marriage of two worlds: the algorithm and math for 3D visualization (Houston's domain) and the go-to-market expertise (Gorniak's).

The company passed $1M ARR in 2020, the same year they restructured around the new platform and Matt joined. At that point, they shifted from "early customers before the platform" to what Matt calls "a SaaS business." They started with SMB customers paying $18k/year for a single product, but quickly moved upmarket. TaylorMade golf clubs became a marquee case study: a customer with 100,000+ product options (different colors, grips, shafts) who could finally let customers visualize their exact configuration. Crate and Barrel used 3Kit to let customers configure couches—cushion size, fabric, hardware finish, color—and see the exact visual result before buying.

The biggest unlock was post-pandemic demand. As Matt explains, "It's like, wait a minute, I'm online. Let's see that microphone. I just chose a blue one... How come I don't see that? How come I still see the stock one?" Conversion rates spiked when customers could actually see their personalized product. TaylorMade saw sales numbers hit for the whole year in just two months after launching with 3Kit. The company also achieved >120% net dollar retention, a rare feat that came from genuine product value and happy customers who didn't return items because they got exactly what they wanted.

The metaverse angle is fascinating but still early—99% of their customers haven't even optimized their e-commerce presence yet. Matt sees 3Kit as "the on-ramp to the Metaverse," where brands could generate licensed digital assets for virtual worlds on demand.

With 220 enterprise customers paying between $18k and $500k annually, 3Kit was projecting to break $10M ARR in 2021 (doubling or potentially tripling from the prior year's ~$5M run rate). They've raised $65M total ($10M in 2019 from friends/family/Godard, $35M Series B in November 2020 from strategic investors like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Capgemini). Matt credits the growth to solving a real problem at scale: brands finally have the tool to show what customers actually want to see, and it works. As he reflects, "If you do the right things... it creates a lot of anxiety for me. I wanted that quick answer. But there really isn't one that I found." The company is now in the position to scale this across every industry that makes configurable products.