Whodat, an augmented reality (AR) platform, has today announced that it has managed to secure $600,000 in its seed funding round from Ideaspring Capital. This transaction marks Ideaspring’s third investment and its first in the AR technology domain.
The investment also marks Whodat’s first institutional round of capital funding. Since the company’s formation four years ago and until now, it was a bootstrapped business.
Commenting on this, Arihant Patni, managing director of Ideaspring Capital, said,
Whodat has a great team led by Sriram (Ganesh) and Kaushik (Das) and their vision is to solidify their SLAM approach. They also aim to provide contextual information about the scene using deep learning approaches and eventually productise the overall package so developers can easily create AR experiences without any knowledge of vision and learning systems.
Founded by Sriram Ganesh and Kaushik Das in 2013, Whodat follows a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model. It is building a proprietary hybrid SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) system to place digital content within indoor environments without markers, which are basically visual cues linked to virtual information.
The company says that it pushes the boundaries of visual interaction. Using emerging technologies, Whodat believes that it adds a whole new dimension to product visualization.
The startup claims to have earned $200k in revenue with $50k in profit for FY 2014-2015. It has worked with companies like Urban Ladder, Huawei, Master Card, Taj, and Ariel, among others.
Sriram Ganesh, the company’s co-founder, has said that Whodat’s goal is to minimize developers’ efforts and that their AR platform makes it easy for developers with minimal knowledge of computer vision and deep learning to develop AR experiences.
Last year, Whodat was selected to be a part of the Microsoft Accelerator programme. Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the emerging field of augmented reality (AR), thanks to its HoloLens, which has merged both virtual reality and augmented reality to create a platform for ‘mixed reality.’
