Bringing the real world into 3D, this company raises hundreds of millions of yuan in financing | 36Kr Exclusive

Author | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

36Kr has learned that KIRI Innovations, a company focused on 3D reconstruction technology, has recently completed its Series A tranche of financing, with the total accumulated financing amount reaching hundreds of millions of yuan. Institutional investors participating in this round include Huawei Hubble, Dongzheng Capital, Tongchuang Weiye, Junke Danmu, Lihe Asset Management, Shenzhen High-tech Investment Group, He Shijia Capital, and 37 Interactive Entertainment. The raised funds will be used to further lower the usage threshold of 3D reconstruction, continuously improve the clarity of 3D reconstruction, explore 4D dynamic reconstruction, and carry out market promotion, among other applications.

KIRI currently has two product lines: Remy, a 3D spatial recording application for general consumers, and KIRI Engine, designed for professional 3D users and commercial scenarios.

The two products target different user groups, but solve the same core problem — restoring objects or spaces in the real world into 3D content through photos and videos. KIRI Engine emphasizes the model's accuracy, parameter controllability, and subsequent editing capabilities; Remy lowers the professional threshold, enabling ordinary users to complete 3D recording directly with their mobile phones.

Remy is also the C-end business that KIRI has focused on expanding over the past year.

In October 2025, Remy made its debut in the Hongmeng ecosystem. Wang Zhengnan, Founder and CEO of KIRI, told 36Kr: "The number of downloads exceeded 1 million 9 days after the product was launched. At present, the total number of accumulated users is about 2.8 million, and the monthly active users are nearly 700,000." Different from traditional photos, after users open Remy, they only need to shoot a video around a person or object according to AR guidance, and the 3D reconstruction will be completed in the cloud. The generated "immersive space" can be viewed and scaled at 360 degrees, and users can also switch to the first-person perspective to move in the previously shot space; the sound captured during shooting can also be preserved together.

The 3D recording capability of KIRI Innovations has also been applied to consumer hardware.

This year, Remy reached a cooperation agreement with Insta360. In the Insta360 app, users can directly convert videos shot by panoramic cameras into interactive 3D spaces, and the 3D reconstruction technology behind this function is co-created by both parties.

Compared with mobile phones that can only shoot in one direction, panoramic cameras can record 360-degree surrounding images at the same time, which makes it easier to avoid missing shots when shooting large spaces, thus lowering the threshold of 3D reconstruction for large scenes. In the past, similar processes often required importing panoramic videos into professional software, adjusting parameters and running for several hours on a high-performance computer; Remy further automates the above processes.

KIRI's capabilities in C-end products benefit greatly from the technology reuse derived from its products for professional users. Wang Zhengnan told 36Kr that the reason why Remy could complete the development of its first version within several months is largely because its underlying technology directly comes from the years of accumulation of KIRI Engine.

The KIRI team started working on 3D reconstruction in 2021, and its first product KIRI Engine was launched in 2022, mainly serving overseas professional users. At present, its application scenarios are concentrated in fields such as 3D printing, game development, and film and television special effects. The company states that KIRI Engine has accumulated more than 2 million professional 3D creators.

The core technology reused by KIRI Engine and Remy is 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS).

Traditional 3D models usually describe the shape of objects with triangular meshes and then attach textures; 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs real scenes by superposing a large number of Gaussian ellipsoids with attributes such as color, size, and transparency. This method is better at restoring complex light, shadow and visual details, and also makes it possible to generate realistic 3D spaces quickly through ordinary images. After 2023, 3D Gaussian Splatting has become an important technical direction of KIRI Engine.

Wang Zhengnan introduced that at the current stage, KIRI Engine and Remy face different challenges. The biggest long-term variable for KIRI Engine comes from generative AI.

In the past, industries such as game development and film and television needed to obtain 3D assets by scanning real objects. However, with the improvement of AI's ability to generate 3D models, Wang Zhengnan judges that in the future, a large number of models that do not require "1:1 restoration" of the real world may be directly generated by AI. What is truly more difficult to be replaced is the recording scenarios that have strict requirements for restoring real information. Therefore, the team began to extend 3D reconstruction from "producing 3D models" to "recording the real world".

Remy faces another problem: the threshold of 3D recording is still too high.

Nowadays, taking a photo only requires pressing the shutter. However, when using Remy, users still need to shoot around the target for a full circle, and then wait for several minutes for the cloud to complete the reconstruction. Wang Zhengnan believes that this is one of the main reasons why 3D recording is currently difficult to become a high-frequency behavior like photos and videos.

"It's not as simple as taking photos or videos. You need to shoot around the target for a full circle, and then the cloud will run for several minutes." said Wang Zhengnan. In the next stage, the team will continue to streamline the shooting and reconstruction process, so that users can obtain 3D content in a way that is as close to a normal shooting operation as possible.

The following is the transcript of the conversation between 36Kr and Wang Zhengnan, CEO of KIRI Innovations, the content has been edited:

36Kr: Why did you make KIRI Engine and Remy two separate products instead of directly adding a consumer-level mode to KIRI Engine?

Wang Zhengnan: Because the users of KIRI Engine are very professional, they need more controllable parameters to meet various usage scenarios in professional industries. But for ordinary people, the goal is to make the software as simple and easy to use as possible.

These two demands are actually conflicting. Professional users will ask: "How do I adjust my parameters?" But when ordinary users see these parameters, they will ask: "What does this mean? Why should I adjust them?"

For example, when you open KIRI Engine to start scanning, you will see different modes such as photogrammetry, LiDAR, featureless scanning, and 3D Gaussian. Professional users can understand them at a glance, but ordinary users may not know which one to choose at all. The approach of Remy is that you click the plus sign to directly enter the shooting interface, and we will help you select the best mode we consider.

36Kr: AI can already generate 3D models directly. For Remy, what is the real moat? What part of 3D scanning cannot be replaced by AI?

Wang Zhengnan: Different from AI-generated 3D models, Remy emphasizes the 1:1 mapping with the real world. A long-awaited family reunion, the campus you are about to graduate and leave, the university dormitory you have lived in for 4 years, a long trip you summoned up the courage to take — all these scenes are worthy of better recording and sharing, and generative AI cannot generate our real memories.

If you look at the underlying logic, I think the biggest value of 3D reconstruction is recording.

Now AI can generate 3D models based on text descriptions, and they will definitely become more and more realistic in the future. But if we take a group photo here today, you will not let AI generate a photo that says "we were here today", because that event did not actually happen.

Recording is different. Generation solves the problem of creation, and reconstruction solves the world that has actually happened. What we want to do is to make 3D a recording method that ordinary people can use.

But the real moat for Remy lies in the first-mover advantage. Software is different from hardware. When two free software products are presented to users, one already has a large number of users, abundant content and positive reviews, while the other is just launched, users will naturally choose the former first. Therefore, it is difficult for latecomers to surpass Remy in a short time, because it has begun to form a siphon effect. The same is true for KIRI Engine. One of the important reasons why it is difficult for us to catch up with Polycam now is that it accumulated users earlier than us.