DURHAM – A whole lot of Americans began some kind of DIY home project following the onset of the global pandemic.  And many more began the process through gathering visual information, using existing applications like Pinterest to organize their concepts.

But sometimes there’s a disconnect between gathering visual images and actually beginning a project.

“People often get stuck trying to envision which mix of products and materials from the images they saved would look best in their space,” said Tina Tang, co-founder and CEO of Bristles.ai, which is in the process of changing the home design landscape by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Bristles will help users move forward,” said Tang, adding that with connecting visual concepts and existing images and products to a Bristles user’s actual physical space, people may finally be ready to take the next step to see their vision come to fruition.

Last fall, Bristles won an NC IDEA MICRO grant.  The company was among the first four that received funding from the newly launched Triangle Tweener Fund led by Triangle-based serial entrepreneur and investor Scot Wingo with backing from more than 80 Triangle-area entrepreneurs and investors.

Still, the company is very much in its pre-seed stage, said co-founder and CEO Tina Tang, in an interview with WRAL TechWire.

But Tang and co-founder Anthony Alers expect adoption of the company’s application, when it’s ready to launch.

A mock-up of how a room looks when empty. Image: Bristles.ai.

“Bristles will empower users to build visual plans they love and then we’ll connect them to retailers,” said Tang, noting that home improvement is itself a $483 billion market category that’s seen a compound annual growth rate of some 14% each of the last two years.

And the company could also easily expand into home furnishings using the same technology architecture, a retail category worth some $146 billion, according to Tang.

“We learned from interviews that when people are ready to buy, they’re open to buying products that are visually similar,” Tang told WRAL TechWire.  Now, the company is working to release its “MVP,” or minimum viable product, to market “as soon as possible to get valuable feedback on the user experience,” said Tang.

The secured funding is intended to support the company’s operations as it acquires new users, said Tang.  Then, once the company has enough data and an established strategy, they’ll raise additional capital in a pre-seed round.

A completed visualization, using Bristles.ai. Image: Bristles.ai.

Origin: living in a new space

In 2018, Alers was pursuing a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience.  Tang had recently decided to leave an IT consulting role to study machine learning in a graduate program full-time.

Plus, they’d just bought a house.  Alers and Tang are engaged, and upon moving into their new house, wished to make their new space feel like a home, Tang told WRAL TechWire.

“We planned to DIY everything and often browsed decor and furniture online and in stores,” said Tang.  “We would save pictures of things that we liked when we came across them, but we wouldn’t buy them because we couldn’t confidently say the purchases would be worth it.”

What they’d really wanted, and really needed, in order to feel confident, said Tang, “was a way to pluck the decor we liked from the photos we saved to see everything together in our space.”

But existing augmented reality applications couldn’t achieve this, Tang said.  In graduate school, Tang took courses in computer vision and language from Dr. Vicente Ordonez, who became a mentor and encouraged the pursuit of creative applications of machine learning.

“I saw that AI had the potential to enable creativity if the technical barrier to access it was removed,” said Tang.  “These projects also revived an artistic side of myself that I was never able to fit into my career before and I found that very fulfilling.”

During this time, Alers and Tang regularly discussed how artificial intelligence could yield greater enablement of creativity.  “But existing tools prioritized completely automating a task rather than granting the user enhanced creative flexibility,” said Tang.  “Photo editing apps, for example, deliver AI features as these magical one-tap filters applied to a full image, reducing creative decisions to choosing an input image and a filter.”

They believed not only that a richer creative experience could exist, but that they could build it.

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Bristles is born

Tang graduated in May 2021, and together with Alers, launched the company.  First, said Tang, they built a mobile phone editing application that allowed users to selectively apply and combine effects based on artificial intelligence.

“To test, I was using our app to apply an autumn model onto the trees outside my window,” said Tang.   “I was really into linen at the time and I realized I could use the app to visualize how a linen curtain could dress up my window.”

Image credit: Tina Tang. A curtain extracted from one image and added to an image of Tang’s window.

“This was the moment we realized our photo editing app was useful for home decor visualization,” said Tang.

They quickly pivoted, with a new focus: planning home decor.

“The ability to test our ideas from all the inspo images we saved completely changed the home decor game for us,” said Tang.  They began to test their product using their own home as a guide, including mapping how to update and use space that had for three years become a dark, tangled mess of electronic wires.

They then took the idea out to others, taking the concept out into customer discovery interviews.

“We learned that there are a lot of people like us,” Tang said.  “Bristles will empower users to dive into the creative process and become their own home design artists.”

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The technology

“With computer vision, we can do more with less,” Tang said.  “We can work with images instead of expensive 3D models or green screens.”

What that means is that users of the Bristles app will be able to add photos of their physical spaces that can then become creative canvases.  Next, they’ll be able to construct realistic mock-ups of their space by dropping in visual assets, using a feature that Tang and Alers built into the application.

“On the image processing side, we developed a solution that enables the user to make precise edits on a mobile touch screen without occlusion by their finger,” said Tang.  “We leverage computer vision approaches to automatically extract objects.”

One model, for instance, will recognize chair or sofa pixels in an image, said Tang.  “Then we can extract them in one swoop,” Tang said.  “We’ve added additional features for more general object extraction like an edge-respecting paintbrush and a chisel tool that removes grouped pixels based on color or space.”

The company is currently adding users to its beta product launch, Tang noted.  “We would love for people to try it!”