Occipital made its first splash years ago with the RedLaser barcode scanning app and 360 Panorama app. Since then, however, it has moved into the 3D scanning and computer visionspace and the company today announced that it has raised a $13 million Series B round from Intel Capital, Shea Ventures, Grishin Robotics and previous investor Foundry Group. This new funding round brings Occipital’s total funding to $21 million.
The company launched its Structure Sensor for the iPad back in 2013. Since then, it has mostly focused on its SDK and the overall Structure platform.
As Occipital CEO and co-founder Jeff Powers tells us, the company revenue currently mostly comes from its hardware, “but we’re really selling a combination hardware-software package. The Structure Sensor by itself only generates a 3D depth map; the transformation of that into 3D user interfaces and 3D models is all thanks to software we deliver.”
The new funding, Powers says, will allow the company to “rapidly advance the Structure platform, and accelerate initiatives to bring spatial computing to everyday life.”
“Our hardware and software platform is being increasingly adopted in industries including medicine, architecture, visual effects, and 3D printing, and by industry leaders like 3D Systems, ILM, and many others,” said Powers.
Looking ahead, Powers tells me, the company plans to look at more ways to use its sensor for virtual and augmented reality applications. “Beyond that, we feel we’re just at the beginning of what our software can do,” he said. “When we launched Structure SDK, it could not even capture objects in color. Now we can capture photorealistic large objects, and explore environments with unbounded tracking. The SDK is only dubbed version ‘0.5,’ so expect it to get much more rich as we approach 1.0.”
Computer vision is obviously a hot topic right now and Occipital clearly hopes that its early start in this market can give it a leg up against the competition. With Project Tango, Google has shown an interest in this space, too, though it has remained relatively quiet about its own mobile 3D scanning and spatial computing efforts.
Besides its SDK, Occipital also currently offers an app for scanning rooms in 3D using its sensor and it still offers its older 360 Panorama app for iOS.
