Fizna

Paul Powers, a law school graduate with a degree in intellectual property law from the University of Heidelberg, was writing his dissertation in 2015 on the biggest problems technology would face in IP law. His conclusion: 3D. While industries had solved content protection for images (iTunes, Netflix), no one could effectively protect 3D intellectual property. "We have to actually know what a file is, of what it's similar to, what's in it, et cetera," he explains. The existing technology trying to understand 3D—point clouds and 2D approaches—missed the fundamental requirement: understanding 3D from a 3D perspective. Fizna was born to create something that could identify and understand 3D models to prevent IP theft.

Fizna launched in 2015 with IP protection as the core use case. Paul and his team built technology capable of deep 3D model recognition and similarity matching. By 2016, they brought it to market, showing it to aerospace, manufacturing, and engineering companies. But the market had other ideas.

When Fizna showed their IP protection solution to major companies, the response was lukewarm—until engineers realized the technology's real value. "My God, we could use this in engineering. We could use this and just seeing if we can manufacture something," customers said. The pivot happened because the pattern recognition at Fizna's core solved an even bigger problem: design engineers spending hours redesigning components their companies had already created.

Paul's first paying customer came through direct sales at the IMTS event in Chicago. "We paid money for it to have a booth there set up," he recalls. "Being a new company with new technology that's not really paralleled by anything else, they weren't even sure where to put us. So they kind of put us the wrong aisle. But it ended up working out okay too." The team discovered that smaller companies converted faster than enterprise giants, though the long-term value lay with large manufacturers. Some early customers got discounted deals in exchange for feedback and patience through the lengthy enterprise sales cycle.

Fizna's pivot from IP protection to engineering productivity proved transformative. Rather than chase every small customer, Paul made a strategic decision: "We were primarily focused on not adding on too many small, smaller customers at the time, because our concern was, since we were so small, our support staff was our development staff." This meant working deeply with large aerospace and manufacturing companies through months-long proof-of-concept cycles, going "one layer at a time and working our way up to the C level."

By August 2018, they had essentially zero revenue. But that changed when they hired their first sales team. Within months, 15 enterprise customers were using Fizna, with the company saving each customer an average of $37,440 per user per year—against an annual subscription fee of just $2,500 per user. The unit economics are compelling: a typical manufacturer with 50-500 engineers signs up, paying $125,000 to $1.25 million annually.

Fizna has raised $2 million from high-net-worth individuals and assembled a 15-person team entirely based in Cincinnati, Ohio. With 15 paying customers and institutional partnerships with NASA Space Camp and Purdue University (which provide non-paying but valuable feedback), the company is approaching $1 million in ARR. Paul's goal for the following year is to add another 100-200 paying customers. The company is burning capital as it scales, having made the strategic choice to raise only equity rather than venture debt, with plans for a Series A round in May to fuel growth. As Fizna moves from proving the concept with enterprise behemoths to ramping a sales organization, the real growth phase is just beginning.