Ideaspring Capital Bets On Augmented Reality Startup Whodat With $600K Funding

Bengaluru-based augmented reality startup Whodat has secured $600K (about INR 3.86 Cr) in its latest round of funding from early-stage Venture Fund, Ideaspring Capital.

Commenting on the investment, Arihant Patni, MD, 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 (augmented reality) experiences without any knowledge of vision and learning systems.”

Launched in 2013 by Kaushik Das and Sriram Ganesh, the startup’s primary thrust areas are building products that harness the power of technologies to help people visualise products to consumers so that they can make informed decisions.

The company caters to both B2B and B2C customers and is building a proprietary hybrid SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) system that will allow it to create visualisations for indoor environments.

Launched in 2016, Ideaspring Capital is an an early-stage venture fund focussed on investing in product innovation startups in India. TV Mohandas Pai, Patni scions Arihant Patni and Amit Patni, angel investors Naganand Doraswamy, and Prashant Desphande joined hands with Sasken Technologies’ CMD Rajiv Mody to float this $18.7 Mn (INR 125 Cr) fund.

In March 2017, it invested $494K in Chennai-based tech startup, Karomi Technology. Following that, it invested $600K Lavelle Networks, a startup in the SDN (Software Defined Networking) space, in the same month.

Whodat was previously a part of Target Accelerator. It was also one of the 13 startups that graduated under Microsoft Accelerator’s CoInnovate Programme in December 2016.

Earlier in March 2016, Noida-based SmartVizX, a virtual reality solutions startup, raised over $500K from the Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India (SA&E India). Following that, in July 2016, Mumbai-based virtual reality content studio, SpectraVR raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from US-based technology venture capital firm Rothenberg Ventures. In February this year, Hyderabad-based augmented and virtual reality startup, Imaginate secured $500K in its Seed round of funding from US-based early-stage VC fund, SRI Capital.

Other players in the segment include Absentia, Virtual Mirror, Realise, Ingage among others.