Scope AR raises $2 million seed round for enterprise AR

Scope AR has raised $2 million in a seed round of funding to expand its enterprise platform for augmented reality.

Above: Scott Montgomerie, CEO of Scope AR.

Image Credit: Scope AR

The money came from Susa Ventures, Presence Capital Fund, and New Stack Ventures. AR has been seen as a more distant opportunity than virtual reality, which has been boosted by gaming. But in the long run, AR is expected to be a $90 billion market by 2020, compared to $30 billion for VR, based on estimates by Digi-Capital, a tech advisory firm.

Scope is not making games or Pokémon Go apps. But the company has several big customers on board, like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Honeywell.

“I am excited Pokémon Go took off, as I was experimenting with that AR technology years ago,” said Scott Montgomerie, CEO of Scope AR, in an interview with VentureBeat. “But at the very least, I  will no longer have to explain what AR is.”

Scope AR is working on an AR platform for “smart instructions,” dubbed WorkLink. WorkLink enables organizations to turn instructions, processes, training, and more into highly interactive and animated content with AR. It has simple drag-and-drop template creation that anyone can use. It makes it possible for non-technical staff to produce highly interactive AR instruction and training materials. The platform has built-in analytics and real-time publishing.

“Scott and his team are building the first killer application for enterprise AR,” said Amitt Mahajan, cofounder of Presence Capital, in an email. “We’re thrilled to back them.”

Scope AR is also operating a remote assistance platform, dubbed Remote AR. With that platform, a technician can use a smartphone to show a camera view of an object that needs repair and send that video to another expert. The expert can offer advice and help fix the object more easily.

Scope AR is empowering organizations across manufacturing, mining, education, energy, automotive, and other industries to leverage AR. Montgomerie started Scope in 2011, working with companies like Boeing on one-off projects. Eventually, it became clear that those kinds of projects weren’t cost-effective, so the company decided to make a platform to automate the creation of AR apps instead.

Montgomerie said, “We wanted to put the tools in their hands so the experts could create the apps more easily.”

The company has 15 employees, and it went through the Y Combinator program last summer. Rivals include companies such as Ngrain, Daqri, and Vuforia.

Above: Scope AR’s Remote AR platform.

Image Credit: Scope AR