When future Trace co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith, and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in spring/summer 2015, it was about as hot as startups get. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captured Silicon Valley’s imagination with in-device imagery, before closing out the year with an $827 million raise.
The story of the intervening years is that of a hugely funded and extremely promising startup struggling to find its place in the market. Tran left his role as creative director in January 2020, while Couture and Smith left in July 2020 and February 2021, respectively.
Trace was founded in 2021, with Tran, Smith and Couture taking on the respective roles of CEO, CTO and Head of 3D Art. The startup, which creates branded, location-based augmented reality experiences, is the product of some of Magic Leap’s early content struggles.
“It’s really hard to create AR content,” Tran tells TechCrunch. “It’s really early in the ecosystem. There were many partners with Magic Leap. Every time they wanted to create content, it took three to six months, with development and 3D art experts and entire teams. We saw an opportunity to make this process much easier.
Trace is a much smaller company than Magic Leap. In addition to its three founders, the company employs a handful of entrepreneurs. Magic Leap’s funding now exceeds $4 billion. Trace, on the other hand, is announcing a $2 million pre-seed this week, co-led by Rev1 Impetuous businesses and businesses. Nonetheless, the company has already teamed up with high-profile names including Qualcomm, Telefónica, T-Mobile, and Lenovo.
Image credits: Trace
If you attended Mobile World Congress this year, you may have discovered the AR experience he created for Deutsche Telekom. Or maybe you saw the mixed reality offering built for the Hip Hop 50 Summit last year in New York.
Trace’s offering centers on an authoring app designed to easily add AR content to a real-world space. Tran likens it to a Squarespace for AR experiences. Once in place, a user can access digital content through the Trace app or a web browser.
The creator experience has so far been limited to a private beta, but Trace plans to open it to the public in the coming months. When this happens, companies will be able to produce experiences as part of a subscription offering.
However, the company is very much in line with Magic Leap in focusing on enterprise customers.
“The partners we’ve had so far have been some of these big brands,” Tran says. “We’re focusing on some of these enterprise-level partners first (…) This is a consumer-facing product, in a way, but we’re seeing that there are currently more ‘opportunities in the business sector.’
techcrunch
