While growing Geofilter Studio, an account representative from Google reached out to Chris Schmidt, informing him that his Google Ads had generated some of the highest-performing metrics they had ever seen. This opened the opportunity to see behind the scenes at Google, which sparked an immediate interest in big data. As a self-taught software developer, he realized that despite the vast amount of information companies have about their users for personalizing goods and services, everyone was missing a core metric—accurate human body dimensions.
In 2018, years before artificial intelligence (AI) entered the mainstream cultural lexicon, Chris founded Pluto Ventures. He was so early with AI that he received emails from venture capitalists advising him to shift his focus away from AI and instead consider NFTs and cryptocurrency, which were the hot topics of that time.
Chris connected with a few local machine-learning developers fresh out of university, who are still with the company almost nine years later. The long-term vision was bold: to build a software system capable of generating precise, three-dimensional body measurements from 2D photos.
“When we first proposed the idea, the consensus was that we were delusional,” Chris recalls. “My initial six-month development roadmap stretched into a three-year R&D marathon. The first time we saw the system work was profound. It was a moment of pure technical sorcery, immediately followed by the realization that we now had to figure out how to deploy this magic.”
A Technological Breakthrough
The system achieved a 98% accuracy rate when benchmarked against 3D body scanners. Most notably, Pluto’s systems only take seconds to run. Chris and his team successfully unlocked a valuable data point. Yet, as Chris frequently says, artificial intelligence is merely a tool—it is not, on its own, a business.
While the potential uses for this technology were vast, from healthcare to insurance to e-commerce, Chris faced a classic operational constraint. With limited initial resources, he knew that the best chance for success was to focus on one industry.
The Online Sizing Crisis
Online clothing returns are a major worldwide issue, with 40% of purchases returned because of sizing problems. Chris believed every solution on the market was going about it the wrong way. It’s clear that consumers don’t want to decode size guides or see items on photoshopped models—they just want to know how the clothes fit on real people. The best way to do this is to see how something fits on someone else with the same body type.
This realization led Pluto Ventures to transform from a pure AI research-and-development lab into a company building a breakthrough social commerce platform called Parallel.
The Grounding Layer for Agentic AI
Looking to the future, Pluto Ventures is applying its years of work to change how we interact with technology. Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving past simple content generation into autonomous digital agents that can execute real-world actions on our behalf. Pluto provides the data required for any industry where human dimensions dictate outcomes.
