Category: ar investment

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AR Software Startup Multinarity Emerges from Stealth with $28M Seed Round

Multinarity, an Israel-based startup working on AR software, announced it’s raised $28 million in the company’s initial seed round. As reported in an exclusive by Calcalist, funding was led by Israeli investors VC Aleph and U.S. investors Corner Ventures.

The company was founded in stealth last year by former Magic Leap execs; company CEO Tamir Berliner was the general manager of Magic Leap Israel and founder PrimeSense founder, and COO Tomer Kahan was a senior director at Magic Leap and former VP at N-Trig.

On its still sparse website, Multinarity calls itself “an early stage startup creating the first killer app for mixed reality.”

Although now out of stealth, Multinarity’s software is still behind closed doors. Speaking to Calcalist, the company revealed its upcoming product is “meant for daily, practical and continual use and improves the productivity and creativity of the user.” It’s also reportedly mobile, is intended for existing and future AR devices, and is not just meant for entertainment or development purposes.

“We are finally building what everyone in this domain has been hoping for – a company and product focused on limitless productivity, that unshackles human-computer interactions from the limitations of space and time,” Berliner tells Calcalist. “We want to create the perfect environment for innovation, collaboration and communication.”

Ok, so we’re no closer at knowing what Multinarity is getting at, but it does seem the company is taking a page out of the Magic Leap playbook here: keep it under wraps and make extraordinary claims—which will eventually require extraordinary evidence to backup.

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Red 6 Raises $30 Million for In-flight Military AR Training Platform

Red 6, a company building an aircraft platform with augmented reality capabilities designed for military training, says it has raised a $30 million Series A investment to further its mission.

Founded in 2018, Red 6 is the creator of the Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS), which brings augmented reality into the cockpit of training planes to allow pilots to experience training scenarios while actually flying.

Earlier this month Red 6 announced it had raised a $30 million Series A investment, which the company claims puts its valuation at $130 million. The investment was led by Snowpoint Ventures with participation by other existing investors and new investors.

Red 6 says its goal is to use AR to solve a specific problem: a shortage of combat ready pilots in the U.S. military. While VR-based flight simulators have been used in training for decades, Red 6 is taking its tech into the real skies, equipping a training aircraft with an AR system that allows pilots to see virtual aircraft and other training assets outside the cockpit.

Red 6 hopes this approach will mean faster and more cost effective training without sacrificing realism. Using augmented reality in the cockpit would mean the pilot in training could, for instance, dogfight against a virtual aircraft or practice strafing runs on virtual ground targets. Compared to doing that kind of training in real life, the AR approach means only one plane actually has to be in the sky, saving time and money on logistics, fuel, maintenance and more. Meanwhile the pilot would continue to feel all the realistic g-forces and other aspects of flight that can only be replicated by actually flying in a real aircraft.

Visually, the foundation of ATARS is a helmet-based AR display of Red 6’s own design. The company says the display is capable of operating in outdoor brightness and has a 150° field-of-view.

Image courtesy Red 6

So far we haven’t gotten a clear look at what the pilot actually sees while using ATARS outside of concept footage and a glimpse of the actual system output in the photo below.

Image courtesy Red 6

We’re quite curious about the tracking, resolution, and visibility, and if the system supports proper occlusion of virtual objects from the cockpit.

While Red 6 is currently running ATARS with Berkut 540 aircraft, the company says it’s also developing the system for integration into the T-38 Talon which is used for pilot training by the United States Air Force.

It isn’t clear to what extent Red 6’s tech has gone beyond a demo or pilot stage, but the company says it has reached Phase III of the Small Business Innovation Research program on behalf of the United States Air Force, which includes financial support and suggests a strong interest in integrating the technology into future programs.

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Snap Acquires AR Display Startup WaveOptics for Over $500M

Snap Inc is making some definite strides into augmented reality territory as of late. It not only announced yesterday that its next-gen version of Spectacles will be a AR device, but it’s now come to light that the company is acquiring WaveOptics, the startup behind the AR optics within the Spectacles themselves.

As confirmed by The Verge, Snap has agreed to acquire the UK-based startup. The reported sum is “over $500 million.”

WaveOptics, which is said to employ 125 people, is reportedly now working under Snap’s hardware division. The Verge reports that Snap is providing half of the acquisition price in stocks, and is reserving the option to either pay in cash or stocks after two years.

Founded in 2014, WaveOptics makes waveguide optics, micro projectors, and full AR modules. Its waveguide tech can be found in many AR headsets such as Rokid’s Project Aurora headset, which includes WaveOptics chassis and optical modules.

4th Generation Spectacles | Image courtesy Snap

More recently, WaveOptics showed off prescription waveguide lenses built in partnership with Luxexcel, a UK-based 3D printing company focused on transparent materials.

A Snap spokesperson confirmed that WaveOptics will both continue operations to supply other companies with its tech whilst working with Snap on custom AR optics.

The 4th-generation Spectacles are being shipped out in relatively low numbers to developers. A reported 1,000 units are supposedly going out to interested devs, so there’s still a long ways to go before Snap starts pitching AR to consumers.

The dev kit has also made some clear compromises to reach a lightweight form-factor; it has a 26.3° diagonal field-of-view—much smaller than HoloLens 2’s diagonal field-of-view of 52°—and only has a 30-minute battery life. Obvious areas in need of improvement aside, the acquisition of WaveOptics is a flag in the sand for Snap. It’s setting itself up to be in direct competition with Google and Facebook as those companies reveal further working on their own respective consumer AR headsets.

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Holoride Secures $12M Funding to Create Immersive in-car VR Experiences

Holoride, the Audi co-founded startup aiming to inject immersive VR and AR into everyday car travel, announced it’s raised a €10 million (~$12 million) Series A investment round.

The company first unveiled its tech back at CES 2019, showing off its platform which integrates a car’s movement with a VR content. The idea is backseat passengers can use a VR headset whilst playing videos and games that are synced-up with the vehicle’s movement, something that aims to not only be fun, but also a comfortable experience since all of the movement you’re feeling in-game is also happening in the physical world.

The round was led by Terranet AB, developers of advanced driver-assistance software (ADAS). Other co-investors include Multi-Dimensional Connectivity (MDC) Limited, Schell Games, Audi, and a group of Chinese financial and automotive technology investors organized by investment professional Jingjing Xu.

The company says it’s using the fresh funding to acquire more talent, attract more content creators, and prepare for its international launch starting next year. The latest round brings the company’s estimated valuation to €30 million (~$36 million).

Terranet, a creator of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), says it will work with Holoride to “enhance the real-time, in-car XR experience by incorporating aspects of its versatile sensor tech software to ensure precision, speed, and intelligence as vehicles move safely and quickly through their environments.”

Pär-Olof Johannesson, CEO of Terranet, will also be joining Holoride’s advisory board as part of the deal.

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Psychic VR Lab Raises $8.5 Million to Grow Browser-based XR Development Platform

Japan-based Psychic VR Lab has announced the close of an $8.5 million investment to grow its cloud-based XR development platform, STYLY.

Psychic VR Lab is the company behind STYLY, a browser-based tool which allows creators to easily build cross-platform 3D spaces which can be viewed in the browser or with VR and AR devices. The company says it’s primarily interested in promoting the creation of XR spaces involving art, fashion, and culture, and hosts a gallery of spaces created with its tool.

Last week Psychic VR lab announced it has raised $8.5 million in venture funding from the likes of KDDI Open Innovation Fund, DG Ventures, DG Daiwa Ventures, DK Gate, and others. The company says this latest investment has brought its total capital raise to $18 million.

According to Physic VR Lab, the new funding will be used to “strengthen the organizational structure” of the company and to accelerate usage of the STYLY in “converting various spaces to XR media.” Along those lines the company says it’s working with AR headset maker Nreal on an XR music exhibition called AGARTHA which will be hosted at MWC Shanghai this year. Physic VR Lab also hopes to attract greater development and usage from the Western audience.

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CREAL Raises $7.2 Million to Bring its Light-field Display to AR Glasses

Switzerland-based CREAL is developing a light-field display which it hopes to bring to VR headsets and eventually AR glasses. In November the company raised CHF 6.5 million (~$7.2 million) in a Series A+ investment round to bring on new hires and continue miniaturizing the company’s light-field tech.

Creal says it closed its Series A+ investment round in mid-November, raising CHF 6.5 million (~$7.2 million) led by Swisscom Ventures with participation by existing investors Investiere, DAA Capital Partners, and Ariel Luedi. The new funding marks ~$15.5 million raised by the company thus far.

Over the last few years we’ve seen Creal make progress in shrinking its novel light-field display with the hopes of fitting it into AR glasses. Compared to the displays used in VR and AR headsets today, light-field displays generate an image that accurately represents how we see the real world. Specifically, light-field displays support both vergence and accommodation, the two focus mechanisms of the human visual system. Creal and others say the advantage of such displays is more realistic and more comfortable visuals for VR and AR headsets. For more on light-fields, see our explainer below.

Light-field Explainer

Light-fields are significant to AR and VR because they’re a genuine representation of how light exists in the real world, and how we perceive it. Unfortunately they’re difficult to capture or generate, and arguably even harder to display.

Every AR and VR headset on the market today uses some tricks to try to make our eyes interpret what we’re seeing as if it’s actually there in front of us. Most headsets are using basic stereoscopy and that’s about it—the 3D effect gives a sense of depth to what’s otherwise a scene projected onto a flat plane at a fixed focal length.

Such headsets support vergence (the movement of both eyes to fuse two images into one image with depth), but not accommodation (the dynamic focus of each individual eye). That means that while your eyes are constantly changing their vergence, the accommodation is stuck in one place. Normally these two eye functions work unconsciously in sync, hence the so-called ‘vergence-accommodation conflict’ when they don’t.

On more advanced headsets, ‘varifocal’ approaches dynamically shift the focal length based on where you’re looking (with eye-tracking). Magic Leap, for instance, supports two focal lengths and jumps between them as needed. Oculus’ Half Dome prototype does the same, seems to support a larger number of focal lengths. Even so, these varifocal approaches still have some inherent issues that arise because they aren’t actually displaying light-fields.

Having demonstrated the fundamentals of its light-field tech, Creal’s biggest challenging is miniaturizing it to fit comfortably into AR glasses while maintaining a wide enough field of view to remain useful. We saw progress on that front early this year at CES 2020, the last major conference before the pandemic cancelled the remainder for the year.

Through-the-lens: The accurate blur in the background is not generated, it is ‘real’, owed to the physics of light-fields. | Image courtesy CREAL

Creal co-founder Tomas Sluka tells Road to VR that this Summer the company has succeeded in bringing its prototype technology into a head-mounted form-factor with the creation of preliminary AR and VR headset dev kits.

Beyond ongoing development of the technology, a primary driver for the funding round was to pick up new hires that had entered the job market, Sluka said, after Magic Leap’s precarious funding situation and ousting of CEO Rony Abovitz earlier this year.

Image courtesy CREAL

CREAL doesn’t expect to bring its own headset to market, but is instead positioning itself to work with partners and eventually license its technology for use in their headsets. The company aims to build a “complete technology package for the next-generation Augmented Reality (AR) glasses,” which will likely take the form of a reference design for commercialization.

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Crowdfunded AR Startup Tilt Five Secures $7.5M Series A Investment

Tilt Five, the startup behind the eponymous AR headset for tabletop gaming, today announced it has secured $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The funding round was led by SIP Global Partners with participation from BITKRAFT Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, and games industry veteran Ken Birdwell, who is known for his previous work on the Half-Life series at Valve. Jeffrey Smith of SIP Global Partners is said to join Tilt Five’s board of directors.

The company says its Series A will be used to hire additional employees, build partnerships, and expand available content.

Founded in 2017 by Jeri Ellsworth, Tilt Five launched its Kickstarter campaign late last year hoping to attract $450,000 to bring its AR headset to life. Within only 24 hours Tilt Five was fully funded, going on to garner over $1.7 million throughout the month-long campaign. Including current pre-orders for the AR headset, this brings the startup’s overall funds to nearly $10 million.

Image courtesy Tilt Five

Tilt Five uses a similar projection-based technology to Ellsworth’s first AR headset system, CastAR, which attracted $15 million in venture funding before closing down in 2017. Similar to CastAR, Tilt Five includes AR glasses, a special retroreflective game board, and a 6DOF wand controller—all of which is made to work with multiplayer interactions in mind, both local and online play.

Tilt Five’s tech isn’t based on the same sort of wave-guide optics as conventional AR headsets though, which gives it a few important benefits over conventional designs; the headset actually projects the image via two head-mounted micro projectors and tracks the wand controller via inside-out sensors.

Image courtesy Tilt Five

This allows Tilt Five to achieve a reported 110-degree field of view, which is far and away larger than HoloLens 2, Magic Leap 1, or even the Nreal Light headset. Also, because it relies on PC, tablet, or smartphones to drive the experience, it only weighs 85 grams. Still, it’s limited to the playspace of the special gameboard, however judging by the startup’s early crowdfunding success, it’s clear there’s plenty of tabletop gamers out there looking for a more immersive experience.

“Tilt Five was founded on the idea that we can bring family and friends together to play in the real world, enhanced with the magical capabilities of immersive 3D technology,” said Jeri Ellsworth, Tilt Five CEO. “While the tech giants invest billions in far-off solutions, this investment expands our ability to deliver on a proven set of technologies resulting in an affordable, social and wearable device.”

Tilt Five says it’s ramping up production now with the intent of shipping kits to Kickstarter backers and pre-order customers over the next two quarters. It’s base model kit currently available for pre-order, Tilt Five XE, includes a pair of AR glasses, a game board and single wand— priced at $359. Larger format kits including three AR glasses, three wands and a gameboard, are said to arrive sometime next year.

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AR Glasses Startup Nreal Secures $40M in Series B Financing

Nreal, the China-based company behind the Nreal Light AR glasses, today announced its secured another $40 million in funding.

As reported by TechCrunch, the latest financing round was led by Chinese video sharing platform Kuaishou, with participation by iQiyi, GP Capital, CCEIF Fund, GL Ventures, and Sequoia Capital China.

This brings the company’s overall funding to $71 million, according to CrunchBase.

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Since its penultimate funding round in February 2019, the company has since commercialized it Nreal Light AR headset, which is currently only available in South Korea. The very glasses-shaped headset, which requires a smartphone to drive its visuals, is being bundled with the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 or LG Velvet and a 5G data plan.

In that country it costs ₩349,500 (~$295) with a data plan; without the smartphone/5G bundle, the headset is priced at ₩699,000 (~$590).

Having more than doubled its lifetime funding with its recent Series B raise, Nreal is no doubt planning on expanding its area of availability. According to Forbes, Nreal Light is slated to launch in the US sometime this Fall, priced at $500, and we’d expect to see other markets open up in the months to come.

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Varjo Raises $54M Financing to Support Its Retina-Quality VR/AR Headsets for Enterprise

Varjo, the Helsinki, Finland-based creators of high pixel density VR/AR headsets for enterprise, today announced it’s closed a $54 million Series C funding round. The company says it will use the funds to accelerate the global expansion and development of its XR hardware and software products.

Investors include Tesi, NordicNinja, Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank, Lifeline Ventures, Atomico, EQT Ventures and Volvo Cars Tech Fund.

The Series C financing brings the company’s overall total funds to $100 million to date.

In addition to the latest funding round, the company’s COO, Timo Toikkanen, will be leading Varjo as CEO. Co-founder and previous CEO, Niko Eiden, will be continuing as CXO and as a board member.

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“We are seeing tremendous demand for virtual and mixed reality use cases, particularly as much of the world continues to work remotely,” said Toikkanen. “When you combine the photorealistic resolution and accurate, integrated eye tracking found in our devices with the broad software compatibility we offer, the possibilities for creating, training and running research in immersive environments are endless. With support from our growing group of investors, we look forward to scaling our operations and delivering the cutting-edge technology our customers need to transform the way they work.”

Varjo is known for its enterprise-level “human-eye resolution” VR/AR headsets, including the XR-1 Developer Edition, VR-2 and VR-2 Pro. Companies such as Volvo Cars, Boeing, Audi, and Siemens use Varjo headsets for industrial applications including training and simulation, design and engineering, and research and development.

Since its founding in 2016, Varjo has expanded its global operations and reseller network to over 40 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, with the launch of sales and direct shipping to markets such as Singapore, Israel, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

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‘Moss’ Developer Polyarc Raises $9 Million to Expand into AR Development

Polyarc, the game studio behind the hit VR title Moss (2018), announced today that is has raised $9 million to grow the studio’s expertise in augmented reality development in addition to virtual reality.

As an indie studio, Moss is so far Polyarc’s first and only VR title, but things must be going well for the studio as it has announced a $9 million Series B investment, which is atypical for indie game studios.

The investment round was led by Hiro Capital with participation from Vulcan Capital (an existing investor), and Galaxy Interactive via its Galaxy EOS VC Fund. The studio says it plans to use the capital to “add augmented reality to the studio’s core business competencies.”

“The thing we want people to remember about Polyarc in 40 years is our characters. Our means to make our characters the most memorable is to build a company oriented around introducing them directly to our players in person. VR, AR, and the spectrum in between, offer an opportunity to connect our players with our characters through physical interaction and emotional feedback in a way that no other medium can match,” said Tam Armstrong, CEO of Polyarc. “This round of funding was essential for us to expand our development focus to further embrace VR and AR games.”

Polyarc was founded in 2016 and launched Moss in 2018, first on PSVR, later on PC VR platforms, and most recently on Oculus Quest. The game has enjoyed consistently high reviews across all available platforms. In our most recent analysis of apps on the Quest store, Moss was the second best rated and the ninth most rated title overall.

Despite the game’s success, more than two years after its launch Polyarc still hasn’t announced plans for a sequel or continuation of the title. However they did expand the game with a free update in 2019.

Indie game studios with successful titles usually channel their revenue toward future projects and sometimes engage with publishers to secure funding for larger projects, but they don’t usually sell shares of their studio like you’d see from a startup.

That makes Polyarc’s investment announcement interesting, especially considering the stated focus on AR. While Moss has enjoyed success in the early VR market, the consumer AR games market is effectively non-existent by comparison as there is no consumer-available AR headset on the market. It’s possible that the studio wants to focus on smartphone-based AR, but that seems like a leap from their experience with immersive game development. We imagine there’s more to this story which hasn’t been revealed by Polyarc just yet.

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