Our Investment in Occipital

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2010, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Occipital Inc., (“Occipital”).  Occipital, located in Boulder CO and San Francisco, CA is creating world-class computer vision products for mobile platforms.

As part of our Human Computer Interaction investment theme, we’ve become firm believers that computer vision technology is fundamentally changing many of the ways that people interact with computers.  With our prior investments in Oblong and Organic Motion, we’ve seen the impact of this kind of technology and a future of applications built around computers being able to “see” what is going on in the real world.

As the performance of mobile computing devices continues to improve rapidly, computer vision technologies are ready to be implemented across these platforms as well.  However, the technical hurdles are, in some ways, even more difficult given the inherent limitations in the mobile ecosystem including processing speed and network bandwidth.

Currently, there are companies that have introduced specific mobile applications that use limited computer-vision techniques, but until now, no one has produced a platform that allows developers to create dynamic content that automatically leverages best-in-class computer vision technology.

Occipital is creating this platform, while also creating highly popular applications as specific examples of their technology.  Their goal is to make real world environments computationally interactive via the devices that we carry in our pockets every day.  Their first three applications (ClearCam, RedLaser, and  360 Panorama) have all become best sellers in mobile application stores.

Occipital was founded by Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy. They were part of the TechStars Boulder program in 2008.  We were active mentors to their company and have stayed in close contact since their graduation from the program.  We are very excited to have the opportunity to continue to work with them.