EIC Accelerator Winner Gravity Sketch and the VR Design Race

Car designers still pay for full-size clay models, and a single one can cost "around a quarter of a million dollars", Gravity Sketch chief executive Oluwaseyi Sosanya told IT Brief UK in June 2026. His London company sells the alternative: a virtual reality studio in which designers sketch and model directly in 3D at full scale, and colleagues on other continents step into the same virtual room to review the result.

In the EIC Accelerator pilot's March 2020 cut-off, the European Commission selected Gravity Sketch Limited for Project Orchestra, "the world's first collaborative professional 3D design tool", as a grant-only winner and the only beneficiary of the project, according to the Commission's list of selected companies. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,411,062.50 towards a total cost of €3,444,375, for a project that ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022. Six years on, the company is active, its sales have grown sevenfold, and its customers include Ford and Adidas. Part of what it promised the EU, a tool that runs on tablets and phones as well as headsets, is not on sale.

Where Gravity Sketch Stands Now

Gravity Sketch Limited is active on the Companies House register, with its confirmation statement for March 2026 filed and its 2025 accounts due by 31 December 2026. Its filing history shows small share allotments as recently as 16 September 2026. The product is still being developed: on 23 June 2026 the company shipped version 6.6.6 of its desktop "screen app", which lets non-VR users import several files at once and duplicate objects, according to Digital Engineering 24/7. A day later it released augmented reality tools that pin virtual models to a physical room so that a team can stand around a real clay model and compare digital variants, IT Brief UK reported. Its website lists further releases in July and September 2026.

The founders still run it. Sosanya and Paredes Fuentes met on a joint design and engineering degree at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London and later worked in industrial design at Jaguar Land Rover, where they saw design intent get lost between sketch, digital file and production, TechCrunch reported in 2022. TechCrunch and Silicon Canals name Daniel Thomas as the third co-founder and chief technology officer. The Companies House officer list tells a slightly different story: Thomas was never a director, while two other directors appointed at incorporation, Guillaume Couche and Pierre-Yves Paslier, left in 2016.

The Technology: Modelling at Full Scale, Together

Conventional product design moves from pen-and-paper sketches to 2D graphics software and then to CAD technicians who rebuild the idea as a precise 3D model; engineers, marketers and managers usually see it only after much of the cost is sunk, the company argues in its CORDIS report. Gravity Sketch replaces the first steps with hand gestures in a VR headset: the designer draws strokes, curves and surfaces in the air, at the size of the finished car or shoe. Curves and surfaces are NURBS geometry, the mathematical surface format used by automotive CAD, so models can leave the tool as IGES files that the company says "work well with Rhino, Maya, Alias, Keyshot and Solidworks", according to its export guide. Exported surfaces still need refinement in those programs, and polygon data is converted into NURBS patches that the guide says can be "tricky to edit".

The difficult part Project Orchestra set out to solve was letting several people edit the same model live. Real-time collaboration tools at the time allowed only viewing, importing and moving objects, the company wrote to the EU; editing requires every intermediate state of an object, and the order of edits by different users, to be synchronised across unstable Wi-Fi connections. Its interim report claimed a "60 fps VR-VR real-time collaboration feature" that was "already beyond state of the art". No independent benchmark of that claim has been published.

What Project Orchestra Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective is specific. Orchestra was to be "accessible through VR, laptops, tablets and phones", let "designers, managers, engineers, and marketers" work on the same design in real time, and export directly to industry-standard CAD software, with claimed workflow savings of "up to 90pct". The reporting page adds four technical aims: integrity, including "Orchestra in the Cloud and via enterprise servers"; scalability to multiple users; compatibility across hardware; and launch preparation, including IP protection. The project grew out of a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study in late 2018, which concluded the multi-user tool was "ready for the measures considered for market rollout", according to its CORDIS report. The study's objective forecast growth from 10 to 28 employees by 2023, a target the company passed, with 72 staff on average in 2022.

The only published report is thin. It is headed "Periodic Reporting for period 2", covering August 2021 to July 2022, yet its text describes work "this period (1 Aug 2020 - 31 Jul 2021)": user research with loaner Oculus Quest 2 headsets, interviews held partly inside VR, and development that was "on track versus project timelines". It says "all deliverables required" were submitted and "the target KPIs" achieved, but the details sit in a technical report that is not public. CORDIS lists the project as closed and publishes no final results.

The public record fills some of the gap. In November 2021, three months into the project's second year, Gravity Sketch launched LandingPad Collab, a free virtual room where up to four people could "collaborate on a design at the same time", with voice chat and the ability to edit each other's work, according to Design World and Digital Engineering 24/7. Today's price list allows 3 users per room on the free tier, 5 on Plus, 10 on Team and more than 10 on Enterprise.

1. Real-time multi-user editing in VRDeliveredLandingPad Collab launched November 2021; rooms now hold up to 10 or more users on paid plans.
2. Access from laptops and desktopsPartlyA desktop screen app and browser access exist, but the help centre limits them to viewing, review and "basic edits".
3. Access from tabletsWithdrawnAn iPad app launched in March 2021, then was unlisted from the App Store; the company "stopped innovating on and maintaining" it.
4. Access from phonesNot deliveredNo phone version has been announced; the product suite lists VR, desktop and web only.
5. Direct export to CADDeliveredIGES export of NURBS curves and surfaces for Alias, Rhino and Solidworks on paid plans.
6. Enterprise serversNot announcedThe Enterprise plan offers "data localization", but no on-premise server version is advertised.
7. Up to 90% workflow savingsUnverifiedOnly customer testimonials; no independent measurement published.

The tablet gap is the clearest. Develop3D reported the free iPad app's launch in March 2021, in the middle of the project, sharing the geometry engine of the VR version and syncing sketches through LandingPad. The company later unlisted it, saying in its help centre that building a device-agnostic "screen creation experience" would "take time and capacity". The page gives no date. On the record available, Project Orchestra delivered its central promise, shared real-time editing in VR with export to CAD, and missed its promise of equal access on every device.

What Gravity Sketch Has Achieved Since the Award

Private money followed the grant within months. A £2.9 million seed round led by Kindred Capital, with Point Nine Capital and Forward Partners, was announced on 16 September 2020, six weeks after Project Orchestra began, according to Tech.eu. In April 2022 the company raised a $33 million Series A led by Accel, with GV, its seed investors and angels including Tony Fadell, Will Smith's Dreamers VC and Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures, taking total funding past $40 million, according to TechCrunch and UKTN. The register shows Hendrik Willem Nelis joining the board on 22 February 2022; TechCrunch quotes Harry Nelis as the Accel partner behind the round. An earlier $1.7 million seed round in 2018 was led by Forward Partners with Super Ventures and Wacom, UKTN reported. No later equity round has been announced, and the share allotments filed since 2022 are small.

Users and customers grew with it. In January 2021 the app became free for individuals, with business and enterprise users still paying, and was used by over 50,000 creative professionals and 60 universities, according to Yanko Design. By April 2022 it reported more than 1 million downloads and 100,000 monthly users, with 40 staff across the UK, the US and Germany, UKTN wrote. Named users across these reports include Ford, Nissan, Reebok, Adidas and Volkswagen; the company's website now also shows Stellantis, New Balance and Puma, with a Ford manager quoted saying a project that would take "months" with traditional tools took about 20 hours.

The audited group accounts show the commercial result. Turnover rose from $886,474 in 2021, an unaudited comparative, to $2.42 million in 2022, $4.62 million in 2023 and $6.60 million in 2024, according to the filings at Companies House. Software licences made up $6.03 million of the 2024 total. Losses were larger than sales in every year: the net loss peaked at $10.29 million in 2023 and fell to $5.47 million in 2024. The accounts also record government grant income of $2,130,473 in 2021 and $1,140,459 in 2022, without naming the grants.

The cut in the loss came with a smaller team. Average headcount rose from 29 in 2021 to 72 in 2022 and 91 in 2023, then fell to 58 in 2024. The 2024 accounts do not explain the reduction, and no layoff announcement could be found.

The Money

The Series A has carried the company since 2022, and it is shrinking. Cash fell from $24.55 million at the end of 2022 to $14.12 million in 2023 and $8.38 million in 2024; net assets fell from $23.17 million to $7.48 million over the same period. The 2024 loss before tax was $6.04 million. The directors said in the 2024 accounts, signed on 19 December 2025, that the group's "sales growth trajectory, its cash levels and its ability to control its operating costs" put it in a good position, and that it has no bank loans. The 2025 accounts, due by the end of 2026, will show whether the cash lasted through the year without a new round.

Why Europe Should Care

On 11 July 2023 the Commission adopted a strategy on Web 4.0 and virtual worlds, estimating that the global virtual worlds market would grow from €27 billion in 2022 to over €800 billion by 2030 and noting that "there is no EU ecosystem bringing together the different players of the value chain", according to its press release and a summary by the European Office of Cyprus. The strategy aims to keep virtual worlds from being dominated by a few big players. Professional design tools for carmakers and footwear brands, two industries Europe is strong in, fit that aim.

Gravity Sketch's own geography points the other way. The company is British, its German subsidiary, Gravity Sketch GmbH, is registered in Munich according to North Data and the company's 2020 accounts, and the 2022 accounts say the group "now predominantly operates in USD" after raising capital in dollars and expanding in the United States. In 2024, $5.31 million of its $6.60 million turnover came from the US and $866,936 from Europe outside the UK. Its free VR app is distributed through the Meta Quest store and Steam, both American platforms, the company's website shows.

The Verdict

Gravity Sketch has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.