Melbourne start-up SwatchMate is set to be among the first batch of Australian Kickstarter projects.

The crowd-funding site launches in Australia on 13 November, the same day SwatchMate plan to launch its first product, the SwatchMate Cube.

SwatchMate is hoping to use Kickstarter to fund the manufacturing of the Cube, which is designed to capture the colour of any surface. It then sends the colour wirelessly to smart phones for matching to paint and Pantone libraries, also working directly with Photoshop as a real-world colour picker.

The SwatchMate team – co-founders Paul Peng, Rocky Liang and Djordje Dikic – formed in 2011 while studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Melbourne University, the Cube’s inception was as a student project, gaining great recognition from the beginning.

It won the Best Engineering Project and Commercialisation Prize at the Melbourne University Endeavour Awards. Following that the Cube made it into the 2013 Accelerator Program, which supports entrepreneurship through mentoring and funding.

The trio have spent months preparing for their Kickstarter campaign.

Co-founders of SwatchMate Rocky Liang, Paul Peng and Djordje Dikic with an early prototype of the Cube.

“Once we were selected for Melbourne University’s Melbourne Accelerator Program, we started planning for our Kickstarter, which meant talking to teams that had done it before,” Dikic says.

“We also started working very closely with the local design community who naturally care about and work with colour every day,” he says.

This collaboration has resulted in the Cube taking away both a Melbourne and Sydney Design Award this year, as voted by the design community.

The team base their success on their willingness to get out and talk to users. SwatchMate has already been in the hands of designers, renovators and photographers, to make sure it’s usable, smart and facilitates creativity.

Features of the SwatchMate Cube include:

iOS and Android app which captures colours on the go, recording moments of inspiration on your smart phone using Bluetooth Smart.
Adobe Photoshop integration allows the Cube to act as a real world colour picker
Amazing accuracy – Patent-pending technology allows the Cube to capture colour as well as the human eye (<1 delta-E)
There is no calibration required, it is switched on and colours can be captured instantly.

For more information on the SwatchMate Cube, visit the website here.

Lisa Rapley

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