Meet Scope AR. The San Francisco-based startup aims to in its own words ‘help make any worker an instant expert with augmented reality’ – and it has secured $9.7 million (£7.4m) in series A funding to help achieve that goal.
The funding round was led by Romulus Capital, with existing investors Angel ListHaystack, New Stack Ventures, North American Corporation, SignalFire and Susa Ventures all contributing.
The company’s products are Worklink and Remote AR. Worklink, which fully supports the HoloLens mixed reality environment, is an AR work instruction authoring platform which allows the creation of ‘smart instructions.’ Users can create actions which collect data and can be deployed globally through an app with no prior coding experience. Remote AR, meanwhile, is an app which allows remote workers to collaborate with experts through augmented reality – not too dissimilar to Microsoft’s Remote Assist tool.
Customers include Lockheed Martin, Unilever and Prince Castle. Scope AR said these companies had ‘achieved impactful results around improving worker efficiencies, reducing equipment downtime and more accurately diagnosing repair issues.’
“Enterprises are now realising that leveraging AR and other agile, remote software solutions can be the answer to many operational challenges they have always faced – from closing the growing skills gap to reducing downtime,” said Krishna K. Gupta, founder and general partner at Romulus Capital. “Scope AR’s product leadership and vision has put them at the forefront of the industry, addressing these challenges with tools that provide workers with instant access to critical information that helps resolve operational issues in an agile and accurate manner.”
Many organisations in the manufacturing, building and utilities sectors are now leveraging emerging technologies to help streamline their operations. MWC19 Barcelona last month was naturally a hive for this sort of activity. Ron Victor, CEO of building automation software provider IoTium, told IoT News that enterprises had ‘all woken up’ to the opportunity during the most recent quarter. “Everybody has said enough of the talking – let’s deploy,” he said.
Other companies in this space include Upskill, an AR-focused enterprise software provider also compatible with Microsoft, and Vuzix, a manufacturer of smart glasses whose customers include GE. Earlier this week ESI Group, alongside AR software solutions firm Diota, announced IC.IDO, a product designed to help engineers identify design risks early in product or process lifecycles. Boeing, Bombardier and Ford are among the companies using it.
Total funding for Scope AR now stands at $15.8 million.
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