You upload a 3D Gaussian Splatting scene, a cloud of points that renders a photorealistic room or object in a browser window. The interface is sparse, a few icons floating over the volume. You click one, drop a text annotation into the scene, and watch it hang there in space, a digital Post-it note pinned to reality. This is the first move in Voluma.ai’s bet: that the next step for immersive 3D isn't just viewing, but talking back to it.
Founded in 2024 in Hilversum, Netherlands, Voluma is a tiny, bootstrapped operation building what it calls a “Spatial Publishing Platform” [VOLUMA.AI, retrieved 2024]. Its focus is exclusively on 3D Gaussian Splatting, a neural rendering technique that has emerged as a faster, web-friendlier alternative to traditional polygonal models or Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). While competitors like Luma AI and Polycam focus on capture and model generation, Voluma’s wedge is the workflow that comes after. It’s for the professional who has a splat and needs to make it speak,to annotate, animate, and deploy it as a standalone story.
The annotation layer
The product surfaces are deliberately lightweight, browser-native tools that feel adjacent to a document editor. Users can upload a Gaussian Splatting scene and enrich it with markers, images, additional 3D geometry, and text [VOLUMA.AI, retrieved 2024]. The company’s unique “Timelapse Mode” lets users encode changes over a splat over time, turning a static capture into a narrative sequence [Radiance Fields, Apr 2024]. The output is a shareable link, a spatial webpage. Co-founder Marc van Vliet, who has a background in visual effects and creative technology, describes the platform as an internal tool that became a product, built for “people to deploy their scenes and do annotations” [YouTube, 2024] [Marc van Vliet - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The free tier allows creation and sharing of up to ten scenes, with full service plans available [Reddit, retrieved 2024] [VOLUMA.AI, retrieved 2024].
A market of makers
Voluma’s early traction is a quiet hum of validation from adjacent fields. LinkedIn posts from partners in 3D scanning and digital twins praise the Gaussian splat viewer and mention collaborative work [James Ascroft - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] [Mindy Li - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The implied customer is a professional in media production, visualization, or digital twins,someone for whom a 3D model is a starting point for communication, not an end product. The company operates with an estimated 1-10 employees and no public funding, suggesting a focus on product refinement and organic community building over aggressive scaling [Prospeo, retrieved 2024].
The crowded spatial floor
The ambition is clear, but the path is narrow. Voluma is entering a field where several layers of competition already exist.
- Capture giants. Tools like Polycam and Luma AI own the first step of creating Gaussian Splats. Their natural expansion path is downstream into editing and sharing, directly into Voluma’s niche.
- Open-source foundations. Frameworks like Nerfstudio provide the underlying code. A capable developer could theoretically build their own annotation layer, though Voluma’s bet is that most professionals won’t want to.
- The 3D universals. Established platforms like Unity or Unreal Engine offer immensely powerful storytelling tools, but they are not built for the lightweight, link-based sharing of a single Gaussian Splat.
Voluma’s defensibility rests on being the simplest, most web-native tool for a specific technical artifact. It must hope that the market for Gaussian Splatting workflows grows quickly enough to support a specialist before the generalists decide to add a “publish” button.
What to watch in Hilversum
The next twelve months will test whether spatial annotation is a feature or a category. Key signals will be whether Voluma can:
- Convert its free users into its first named enterprise customers.
- Announce a strategic partnership that embeds its viewer in a larger platform.
- Secure its first institutional funding to accelerate development against larger, well-capitalized rivals.
The company’s current bootstrap mode is a strength for focus but a potential limit on reach. The technical moat,deep expertise in manipulating and deploying Gaussian Splats in the browser,is real but narrow.
Every new medium needs its editing suite. Voluma.ai is betting that for the emerging language of 3D Gaussian Splatting, the most valuable tool won't be the camera, but the red pen. It’s building for the moment when we stop just looking at these photorealistic clouds and start writing in the margins. The cultural question it's answering is a subtle one: in a world filling up with immersive captures, who gets to be the author?
Sources
- [VOLUMA.AI, retrieved 2024] VOLUMA.AI | Spatial Publishing Platform | https://voluma.ai/
- [Radiance Fields, Apr 2024] Voluma.ai adds Timelapse Mode | https://radiancefields.com/voluma-ai-adds-timelapse-mode
- [YouTube, 2024] Voluma.ai: A 3D Gaussian Splatting Start-Up - Marc van Vliet | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEu72LZnF48
- [Marc van Vliet - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Marc van Vliet - Co-Founder - VOLUMA.AI | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mediamarc/
- [Reddit, retrieved 2024] r/GaussianSplatting on Reddit: We Are LIVE - Voluma.ai is in public beta! | https://www.reddit.com/r/GaussianSplatting/comments/1iidej8/we_are_live_volumaai_is_in_public_beta/
- [Prospeo, retrieved 2024] VOLUMA.AI company overview | https://prospeo.io/company/voluma-ai
- [James Ascroft - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] James Ascroft - Sairo.uk | https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-ascroft-2a9b01a3/
- [Mindy Li - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Mindy Li - 3D Gaussian Splatting, Mobile Scanning, AI and... | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindy-li-7a09948a/