Augmented reality creation platform Trace launches with $2M – Business
Trace, a location-based augmented reality creation platform, today announced its launch with $2 million in funds led by Rev1 Ventures and Impellent Ventures to make it simple for businesses to bring their content into the virtual.
The startup’s oversubscribed pre-seed round was also joined by Everywhere Ventures, the Ohio Innovation Fund, Portland Seed Fund, Allied Venture Partners, Service Provider Capital, Astir Ventures, Move VC and Phoenix Venture Fund. Other major investors in the extended reality industry also joining the round included Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures.
Trace was founded in 2021 by co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith and Sean Couture who formerly hail from the AR headset developer unicorn Magic Leap Inc. The company is best known for developing and launching high-priced, enterprise-focused AR headsets, the latest of which, the Magic Leap 2, shipped in 2022.
Augmented reality is a technology that superimposes computer-generated imagery on a user’s view of the world using a headset or a mobile device, which acts as a “window,” to allow a mix of both virtual objects and the real. Trace’s platform provides tools for businesses to easily make location-based AR content for smartphones and devices such as AR glasses or Apple Inc.’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset.
“Creating AR content is typically a complex process that is out of reach for anyone other than experts and agencies,” said Greg Tran, chief executive and co-founder of Trace, who formerly served as creative director and principal designer at Magic Leap. “Trace uses a beginner-friendly approach to creation so that AR deployments that previously took months can happen within just a few moments. What Canva did for graphic design and SquareSpace did for websites, Trace can accomplish for AR.”
The company said that although the release of the Vision Pro has been helping to bring what is called “spatial computing” into the mainstream, much of today’s AR content is still stuck in the past when it worked primarily with 2D screens on mobile devices. Spatial computing refers primarily to immersive tracking capabilities that enable the placement of 3D virtual objects within the real world that can track their position and interact with physical objects.
This means that holographic objects, such as a virtual beachball or a video game character, can be percieved as being part of the real world, interact with a user’s hands or even disappear behind other objects such as a wall, a couch or a tree.
Trace’s team includes members with expertise from backgrounds including Harvard, the Walt Disney Co., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The company said that it formed with the belief that AR content is at its best when it’s integrated closely with its physical surroundings, providing an immersive experience and ease of interaction.
Although the company has not unveiled itself until today, the company said that it has already assisted customers with building AR experiences including the Hip Hop 50 Summit to large retail stores. It has also participated in delivering activations for Deutsche Telekom AG at Mobile World Congress.
Although the platform is still in beta mode, early customers of Trace include T-Mobile US Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. The company’s tools are being used for numerous purposes including employee training and retail product exhibitions.
“Deutsche Telekom used Trace to power a mixed reality experience at Mobile World Congress 2023, and the results couldn’t have impressed us more,” said Elmar Schrage, head of business XR development at Deutsche Telekom. “The end-to-end, user-friendly approach offered by Trace is unique and lets us deploy high-fidelity immersive experiences. Trace is an ideal tool empowering our sales team to effectively present complex products or simply to ‘wow’ our customers in our flagship stores.”