Augmented reality technology start-up Whodat Tech has raised $600,000 in funding from early-stage fund Ideaspring Capital, the company said on Tuesday.
The company will use the funds for research and development, and team expansion.
Founded in 2013 by Kaushik Das and Sriram Ganesh, the Bengaluru-based company provides augmented reality technology stack or software to other businesses for them to build an AR-based application or product feature.
Augmented reality or AR technology juxtaposes elements into a real scenario. For instance, while browsing furniture online on phone, AR technology can enable the user to know how the furniture will look in the customer’s house, by projecting the product in its entirety and dimensions in the room.
The company currently has four clients across retail and real estate, one of them being online furniture retailer Urban Ladder, said, Ganesh.
Typically such a technology requires a paper marker that identifies the area projections. However, Whodat claims that its technology works without such a marker.
Whodat’s technology is available for Android and iOS mobile applications to integrate AR product features.
“Whodat’s goal is to minimize developers’ efforts…our AR platform makes it easy for developers with minimal knowledge of computer vision and deep learning to develop AR experiences,” said Ganesh.
Currently a team of 10, Ganesh expects to it be up to 18 in another two years.
“The primary motive of Whodat is to bring AR to the masses through relevant use cases,” said Ganesh over a telephonic interview.
Going forward, the company plans to have social media platforms as client. “These are platforms that have one million to 20 million users and typically earn revenues through advertisements… Whodat could tie up with the advertising network and AR could be a form in which the ads can be viewed by the users” explained Ganesh.
This year, Whodat plans to run two to three months of pilot of a newer version of the software with these online social platforms before a full-fledged roll-out in another 12 months.
Whodat is Ideaspring’s third investment. The fund plans to invest in four-to-six start-ups every year and close 15-18 deals by 2019, Mint reported last year.
A tech-focused fund of Rs125 crore, the fund was launched in April 2016 by angel investors Naganand Doraswamy and Prashant Deshpande; T.V. Mohandas Pai, co-founder of venture capital firm Aarin Capital; Rajiv Mody, managing director of Sasken Technologies; and Amit and Arihant Patni, founders of Nirvana Venture Advisors.
Recently, another start-up in the segment of AR and VR (virtual reality), Imaginate Software Labs, raised Rs3.35 crore in seed investment from venture fund SRI Capital, VCCircle reported in February.
Source: Mint