- Emerge announced it raised $12 million in Series A funding led by M13 with participation from Vulcan Capital, LionTree Partners, and other investors
Emerge announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by M13 with participation from Vulcan Capital, LionTree Partners, and several other investors. Including this round, Emerge has raised a total of $18 million.
What does Emerge do? Emerge has built a platform that enables users to feel and share immersive content with bare hands. Emerge was founded by Sly Lee, CTO Isaac Castro, and CFO and Head of Insights Mauricio Teran. They met at Singularity University — which is a program sponsored by Google and NASA.
Based out of LA, Emerge’s team includes technology leaders with previous roles at DFJ, GV, Daqri, and Raytheon. And they have helped develop technologies for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Rover at NASA JPL. And they have also brought consumer electronics and extended reality (XR) products to market.
“If you think about technologies we have today to keep in touch with our loved ones from a distance, we are extremely limited in our ability to connect and feel present with them,” said Lee. “Even with technologies like XR, you’re still a spectator limited to two senses: sight and sound. We have a 10-year roadmap to build products that create the next paradigms of presence.”
Emerge is currently building a consumer product that enables users from distant locations to physically touch, feel, and share immersive content in XR using their bare hands.
“Our vision is to create a future where distance and time don’t stand in the way of feeling present. Our goal is to create new interaction standards and a new language of touch for multi-sensory XR experiences,” added Castro.
Through its technology, developers can use Emerge to build applications around some interesting use cases like playing virtual chess with a grandparent, using touch sensations for conveying emotions rather than using emoji, sculpt digital clay with your hands, feeling the rotation of a neutron star, and shape and feel music with your hands.
“Recent advances in immersive displays, cloud computing and 5G, commoditization of key sensors, and advancements in AI, amongst other converging technologies hint the time is right for the transition to the next computing platform,” explained Teran.
With this round of funding, Emerge is going to rapidly grow its team. And they are planning to engage Unity developers and creators in early 2020.
