Gracia AI, the London-based company building the first production-ready infrastructure for 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS), has announced $1.7M in funding from a group of top-tier funds and angel investors, including EWOR and one of the original pioneers behind NeRF. With this new round, Gracia positions the company as one of the fastest-growing players in an industry that barely existed two years ago.
From seed to scale: what changed since the first round
When Gracia raised its initial round in early 2024, the company was focused on static Gaussian Splatting and early research demos, video splats didn’t exist yet. Over the past year, Gracia has moved far beyond that stage. The team became the first to bring dynamic 4D Gaussian Splatting to standalone VR headsets (not just PCVR), making real-time playback possible without any external hardware.
The company also launched a new VFX/CG pipeline – a revenue-generating direction that did not exist at the time of the previous round enabling studios to use 4DGS in real VFX and production workflows. In parallel, Gracia built a full creative toolkit for editing, camera work, and scene manipulation through 4DGs.
Gracia AI now provides the full production tech stack needed to bring 4DGS content into real workflows across XR, VFX, film, advertising, gaming, and next-gen creative tools.
A startup born from a viral tweet
Gracia’s story began when co-founder and CTO Andrey Volodin, previously an early team member at Prisma (150M+ downloads), posted a technical demo on social media. Within hours, the 4D Gaussian Splatting clip went viral and creators, engineers, and VFX artists flooded his inbox asking for tools that didn’t yet exist.
That response pushed Andrey and co-founder Georgii Vysotskii to start a company. Their first idea was simple “YouTube for volumetric video.” But as they began working with creators, they realised the real problem wasn’t distribution, but production. No one had the tools to actually make high-quality 4DGS content. That insight set Gracia on the path to building the full-stack infrastructure the industry had been missing.
The first full-stack 4DGS production system
Gracia AI now operates the world’s first scalable, end-to-end infrastructure for producing and deploying 4DGS volumetric video — from raw capture to final output. The system combines cloud-accelerated 4DGS processing with a full studio environment for editing, timeline control, camera work and creative manipulation. For developers, Gracia provides dedicated Unity and Unreal plugins, while 4DGS content can also be viewed through WebGPU-based 2D playback on Mac and web.
The platform additionally supports standalone VR playback on Quest 3/3S and Pico 4 Ultra, with all other headsets accessible via PCVR.
With file sizes of ~1GB per minute and real-time playback across devices, Gracia brings Gaussian Splatting out of the lab and into real production workflows. Gracia’s system enables studios and developers to create photorealistic volumetric video with natural parallax, consistent motion, and rich textures at a level previously seen only in research labs.
“Volumetric video has existed for a decade, but quality and performance limitations held it back,” said co-founder Georgii Vysotskii. “Gaussian splatting finally closes that gap, and Gracia brings it into production.”
Beyond infrastructure, Gracia is also pushing the boundaries of content quality itself.
The team continues to advance the core 4DGS technology, tackling long-standing challenges in volumetric capture, particularly around fast, complex motion.
“Earlier versions struggled with fast, complex motion either requiring an excessive number of Gaussians or producing visible artifacts. Our latest release finally solves this: even footage captured at 50fps can now be played back in ultra-smooth slow motion with minimal artifacts, while preserving fine details. This makes 4DGS viable for high-demand use cases like sports and film.”
— Anton Fonin, R&D at Gracia
Adoption across Big Tech, Hollywood and entertainment
Despite being a young company, Gracia AI is already earning traction across Big Tech, Hollywood and Europe’s entertainment world. The team’s 4D Gaussian Splatting technology is being tested inside next-generation VFX pipelines, adopted for creative R&D at global tech companies, and even used to power the world’s first 4DGS runway show for Karl Kani. Gracia’s volumetric video system is also powering experiences at PortAventura, one of Europe’s major theme parks.
“The quality that Gracia delivers in VR is unmatched,” said Tipatat Chennavasin, General Partner at The Venture Reality Fund. “It’s some of the most impressive volumetric content ever experienced on XR headsets.”
Over 50M next-gen VR/XR headsets have already shipped globally, with analysts projecting nearly 100M devices by the middle of the decade. Industries from film and fashion to sports, music and training are rapidly adopting immersive formats yet a fundamental bottleneck remains: there is no industrial-grade infrastructure for 3D/4D content creation.
“We believe the future of XR and wearable glasses requires a new type of content photorealistic, dynamic and truly 3D,” said Vysotskii. “Gracia provides the underlying technology studios need to build that future.”
- Gracia’s volumetric flexibility allows directors to bypass expensive re-shoots entirely, saving $50,000 – $100,000 per avoided shoot day by moving full camera control into post-production.
- By using 4DGS to create virtual sets, productions instantly save $30,000 – $70,000 per shoot on location logistics.
- The technology replaces high-cost robotic camera systems, saving up to $15,000 per shot, and reduces post-production character budgets by 30% to 50%.
