When future Trace co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith, and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in Spring/Summer 2015, it was as hot as startups get. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captured Silicon Valley’s imagination with in-device recordings before capping the year with an $827 million fundraising raise.
The story of the past few years is one of a hugely funded and extremely promising start-up struggling to establish itself in the market. Tran left his position 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 develops location-based, branded augmented reality experiences, is a product of some of Magic Leap’s early content problems.
“It’s really difficult to create AR content,” Tran tells TechCrunch. “It’s really early in the ecosystem. There were many Magic Leap partners. Whenever they wanted to create content, it took three to six months, requiring development and 3D art experts and entire teams. We saw an opportunity to make this process much easier.”
Trace is a far more modest company than Magic Leap. In addition to its three founders, the company employs a handful of contractors. Magic Leap’s funding now totals over $4 billion. Trace, on the other hand, is announcing a $2 million pre-seed led by Co. this week Rev1 Ventures and impulsive ventures. Still, the company has already worked with some high-profile names, including Qualcomm, Telefónica, T-Mobile and Lenovo.
Photo credit: Track
If you attended Mobile World Congress this year, you may have come across the AR experience he created for Deutsche Telekom. Or maybe you saw the mixed reality offering created for the Hip Hop 50 Summit in New York last year.
At the heart of Trace’s offering is a creator app that makes it easy to insert AR content into a real space. Tran likens it to a Squarespace for AR experiences. Once the solution is set up, a user can access the digital content via the Trace app or a web browser.
The Creator Experience has so far been limited to a private beta, but Trace expects to open it to the public in the next few months. In this case, companies can create experiences as part of a subscription-based offering.
One way in which the company is very close to Magic Leap is its focus on enterprise customers.
“The partners we’ve had so far have been some of these big brand companies,” Tran says. “We’re focusing on some of these corporate partners first […] This is in some ways a consumer-focused product, but we see that there are more opportunities in the enterprise space right now.”