AR Investment

Lynx Secures $4M in Series A Funding, Aims to Become “European Champion of Mixed Reality”

May 25, 2022 From roadtovr

Lynx, the French XR hardware startup known for crowdfunding the Lynx R-1 mixed reality headset, today announced it’s secured $4 million in its Series A round, led by social VR platform Somnium Space.

Alongside Somnium Space, participants in the latest funding round also include what Lynx calls early supporters of the company and “other investors involved in the AR/VR field such as ex-Meta and Google engineers.”

This brings the company’s total outside funding to $6.8 million, according to Crunchbase data, following the R-1 headset’s $800,000 Kickstarter campaign back in late 2021 and a seed round of $2 million in early 2019. As a part of the deal Artur Sychov, founder & CEO of Somnium Space, is joining the company’s board of directors.

Built on Qualcomm’s XR2 chipset, Lynx R-1 combines high quality cameras and virtual reality displays to achieve passthrough AR in addition to standard VR (aka, mixed reality), making it an early pioneer of the category. The headset also ditches the standard Fresnel lenses for a novel optic called a “four-fold catadioptric freeform prism,” which is said to slim down the size of Lynx R-1 seemingly beyond what current Fresnels can do.

“At Somnium Space we truly believe in the future of open and decentralized Metaverse which empowers its users. This includes, not only software, but also very importantly hardware,” says Artur Sychov, Founder & CEO of Somnium Space. “The Lynx team led by Stan has created an extraordinary AR / VR device (Lynx-r) with openness in mind which will change and revolutionize the way we all think and interact with this market category. I am very happy to support this company and believe that together we will push the boundaries and potential of the VR/AR industry forward.”

Founded in 2019, Lynx has high ambitions for its R-1 headset too. Priced at $600 for its consumer version, the company is looking to lead the way into the same product category that many established players are soon to enter, including Meta with Project Cambria and Apple with its rumored headset, reportedly code named N301.

“We have this opportunity right here to create the European Champion of Mixed Reality with our work at Lynx, supported by a vibrant community of users and developers desperate to see alternatives to Big Tech companies products and their closed ecosystems.” says Stan Larroque, founder and CEO of Lynx. “What’s the point of creating a European Metaverse if the underlying platform, the door we use to access it, remains in the hands of the same big players with their damaging business models?” he adds.

Since finalizing the design of Lynx R-1, the company has also completed an office expansion in Paris, now at more 200 square meters of R&D, and established a new office in Taiwan.

Google Acquires MicroLED Startup Raxium to Bolster AR Ambitions

May 5, 2022 From roadtovr

Google is adding to its portfolio of XR microdisplay designs and talent, as the company announced it’s acquired microLED (µLED) designer Raxium.

The acquisition was previously reported by The Information in March, however now Google has confirmed in a blog post that it has indeed acquired Raxium, a five-year old startup building microdisplays for use in AR and VR headsets.

The Information’s report held Raxium was sold to Google for $1 billion, however official details of the acquisition are still murky. Google says Raxium will join its Devices & Services team, which is tasked with development of Google’s consumer devices.

It’s thought that Raxium will allow for Google to create lighter, cheaper displays for its upcoming AR devices. While conventional Super AMOLEDs found in smartphones measure around 50 µm per pixel, Raxium says it’s shrunk its microdisplays to feature µLED measuring 3.5 µm per pixel. The company claims its technology has led to an efficiency “5X greater than the previously published world record.”

“The team at Raxium has spent five years creating miniaturized, cost-effective and energy efficient high-resolution displays that have laid the foundation for future display technologies. Raxium’s technical expertise in this area will play a key role as we continue to invest in our hardware efforts,” says Rick Osterloh, senior VP of Google’s Devices & Services team.

Google is undoubtedly gearing up to release XR headsets of some type in the future, which may compete with devices from Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Snap. In 2020, Google acquired North, a Canada-based company known for creating unobtrusive prescription-compatible smartglasses—a sight more stylish than Google Glass. Check out our primer on the difference between smartglasses and AR headsets to learn more.

Earlier this year Google snapped up Bernard Kress, principal optical architect on the Microsoft HoloLens team. Kress is now the Director of XR Engineering at Google Labs, an internal XR division founded late last year. According to previous reports, Google Labs is currently working on an AR headset, code named Project Iris, which is rumored to ship sometime in 2024.

Reports detailing Project Iris maintain a device providing a standalone experience with onboard power, computing, and outward-facing cameras for world sensing capabilities—similar in description and function to headsets like HoloLens or Magic Leap.

Waveguide Maker DigiLens Announces New Investment at $530M Valuation

April 7, 2022 From roadtovr

DigiLens, a maker of waveguide optics for AR glasses, today announced a second close of its Series D funding round, claiming a $530 million valuation.

DigiLens is one of several companies building waveguide optics and positioning them for use in XR. Waveguides allow for extremely compact near-eye optics which are no thicker than the lenses on a pair of glasses.

Today the company announced a second close of its Series D investment round which brings participation from Corning, a major materials company known for its Gorilla Glass product that’s used widely in the smartphone space, and Optimas Capital Management, the strategic investment arm of Goertek which is a major manufacturer of XR devices.

The Series D investment raised “more than $50 million”; the first close of the round was originally announced back in November 2021 and valued the company at $500 million, according to DigiLens.

With additional investment from Corning and Optimas Capital Management in the second close of the round, the company says it has been valued at $530 million. The full round includes a number of strategic investors including Samsung Electronics, Diamond Edge Ventures (the strategic investment arm of Mitsubishi Chemical), and others.

In an investment round, a startup’s valuation is determined by the price of each share multiplied by the total number of shares in the company. It’s fairly rare for a company to state their valuation outright, except in cases where they believe the valuation shows the company in a position of strength and momentum.

That’s clearly the case here; with waveguides expected to be a critical component in AR headsets and glasses targeting mainstream adoption, DigiLens is vying to be the leading supplier of the technology. The goal of publicly announcing a large valuation is likely to throw off competitors by making potential investors think twice about who is leading the race toward an AR glasses market that many believe is poised to explode.

The company claims its particular approach to waveguides—diffractive gratings manufactured with an optical copy process—are the most cost effective and scalable option among available waveguide technologies. DigiLens also says its specific manufacturing process allows for more flexible optical designs that give its optics advantages over other waveguides.

Of course, every waveguide company makes similar claims about manufacturability and scalability; it won’t be clear who is actually right until we start to see mass-produced devices coming to market.

To that end, the company claims the first products based on its waveguide technology will hit the market within the next year.

“We’re working on projects today that use our industry leading volume Bragg grating technology that over the next year will be in the market in a material way. These advances will showcase that we’re the only solution that is going to work when efficiency, uniformity and cost are considered,” says DigiLens CEO Chris Pickett. “Then, with our next generation technology, we’ll have a step function in performance that will extend our lead even more.”

And we’ve got a good clue about what the first such devices could look like.

Last year DigiLens revealed the Design v1, a modular reference headset which the company hopes will accelerate the development and consumerization of AR glasses. The device is based on Snapdragon XR2 with a claimed 50° diagonal field-of-view from the company’s optics. Road to VR got an exclusive hands-on with the headset.

It seems likely that companies working with DigiLens will have received a sample of the Design v1, and some may even be using it as the basis for their own design.

And while AR glasses are where the industry ultimately wants to reach with this technology, it’s likely that we’ll see non-immersive smartglasses as the first entrants into the all-day wearable glasses space, eventually giving way to similar but more advanced devices with full AR capabilities.

Dent Reality Raises $3.4M to Bring AR Turn-by-turn Directions into Retail

November 24, 2021 From roadtovr

Dent Reality, the UK-based augmented reality startup, announced it’s secured £2.5m (~$3.4m) in funding, something the company plans to use to further its efforts to bring phone-based AR navigation into the retail sector.

The funding round was led by Pi Labs, with participation from Europe’s Sugar Capital, Silicon Valley’s 7Percent Ventures, and a number of angel investors. According to Crunchbase data, this follows a pre-seed investment round closed in March 2020, the amount of which wasn’t publicly disclosed.

Dent Reality has been building its AR-driven indoor positioning system for some time now. We last heard about Dent Reality early-2019 when the company first announced it would release a software development kit for iOS so retailers could integrate the map of indoor spaces, figure out where the user is, and use virtual paths and arrows to help shoppers find their destinations—a bit like an indoor GPS.

Co-founded by Andrew Hart and Ben Rosenbaum in 2019, the company has made strides in achieving wider recognition from traditional retailers. The company reveals it’s been working with UK-based retailer Marks & Spencer on a new testcase for its indoor tracking in the retailer’s Westfield London store in White City. That’s M&S in the video above.

“The app helps shoppers find every item on their list, with real-time guidance and information to supercharge their experience,” Dent Reality says. “The potential of the technology is extensive, and can be applied to campuses, airports, shopping centres, and museums, for example. Dent Reality’s waiting list currently includes hundreds of large organisations across a diverse range of different sectors.”

The studio says its able to operate in an environment where there may be 40,000 items in a typical location, and thousands of locations per retailer.

“Our vision is that every physical space will become digitally connected, enabling an entirely new type of interaction with the world around us. These ‘smart spaces’ will unlock rich information and transform billions of daily interactions for shoppers and retailers,” said CEO and co-founder Andrew Dent. “Right now, the biggest players in tech are working on building next-generation augmented reality wearables, and we’re building the killer consumer use-cases for this transformative technology. In the future, providing a frictionless digital experience in a physical location will become as essential for every business as having a website is today.”

Individual investors include Indeed.com co-founders Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, social VR founder Esteban Ordano, Tumbler veteran Matt Hackett, and ex-president of Citymapper Omid Ashtari.

The funding will be used to expand its team and services, the studio says, which will bring its services to new stores and retailers.

Leading Hand-tracking Company Ultraleap Raises $82 Million Investment

November 18, 2021 From roadtovr

Ultraleap, a leading company focused on hand-tracking interfaces, this week announced it has secured a £60 million (~$82 million) Series D investment, with the goal of expanding its hand-tracking and mid-air haptic tech in the XR space and beyond.

Formerly known as Ultrahaptics, Ultraleap was formed after the UK-based haptics company acquired leading hand-tracking company Leap Motion back in 2019. The new name clearly defined the merger’s unique combination of mid-air ultrasonic haptics now underpinned by some of the best hand-tracking tech in the industry.

This week Ultraleap announced it has raised a £60 million (~$82 million) Series D investment with participation from new investors Tencent, British Patient Capital, and CMB International, alongside existing investors Mayfair Equity Partners and IP Group plc.

“With this investment round, Ultraleap will continue to bring Gemini to different operating systems and increase their investment in tooling to enable developers to build more applications using the best interface—your hands. Ultraleap will also continue to invest in R&D to drive their machine-learning-based hand tracking even further ahead,” the company said in its investment announcement.

Ultraleap is betting that hand-tracking will be the primary input for XR and the metaverse. Last month the company released its latest revision.

While the company has been trying to get its tech into the XR space for many years now, it has yet to find significant traction. Though Ultraleap hand-tracking can be found on a few headsets like those from Varjo and Pimax, leading devices implementing hand-tracking—like Quest 2, HoloLens, and Magic Leap—are using their own solutions, as far as we know.

However, with a growing number of XR devices on the market and the steady march toward consumer-friendly AR glasses, the company seems poised to find the right fit eventually.

Ultraleap is also looking to find a home for its tech outside of the XR realm. The company has long been angling its tech in the automotive space as an in-car interface, as well as the out-of-home space in areas like exhibits, marketing installations, and touchless self-service kiosks.

AR Glasses Creator Nreal Secures $100M Series C Financing to Expand Internationally

September 27, 2021 From roadtovr

Chinese AR glasses startup Nreal announced it’s raised a fresh $100 million Series C financing round, something it says will be used for R&D and to fund wider international expansion.

As first reported by CNBC, the latest round reportedly brings the company’s valuation to $700 million. That figure was obtained by an anonymous source with knowledge of the deal, CNBC says, however the company has yet to comment.

The Series C round was led by YF Capital, NIO Capital, and Angel Plus China, with participation by Sequoia Capital China, GP Capital, GL Ventures. According to data reported by Crunchbase, this brings the company’s lifetime funding to $171 million.

Nreal is probably best known for its smartphone-tethered AR glasses, dubbed Nreal Light which made headlines back at CES 2019 for its relatively small form-factor in comparison to Magic Leap One or Microsoft HoloLens.

Nreal Light achieves this by offloading processing to a compatible smartphone. It also incorporates what are called ‘birdbath’ optics, which are notably cheaper to produce than waveguides and typically have greater light efficiency.

Nreal Light has been on sale through telecoms in Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Spain, typically priced between $600 and $820 depending on the region.

Notably the Beijing-based company hasn’t launched Nreal Light in China or the United States, something Nreal CEO Chi Xu says may happen at some point in 2022 along with “more countries as well,” Chi Xu tells CNBC.

The company’s Series C comes at a time when Apple is clearly making preparations for its own XR headsets. A recent report holds that Apple is sourcing parts for its VR headset. A mid-2020 report from serial leaker John Prosser holds that Apple’s AR glasses are headed to market sometime in late 2021 or early 2022.