Squint – a technology platform that uses augmented reality (AR) to optimize factory procedures and empower operators – announced $6 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding from Arc, Sequoia Capital’s pre-seed and seed-stage catalyst, and Menlo Ventures’ venture studio Menlo Labs, along with several angel investors.
Squint utilizes AR to power an intuitive mobile platform for factory operators who need dynamic and contextual help mapped to the world around them. And the Squint platform brings the shop floor binder – full of instructions – to life by providing operators with an interactive experience that is both engaging and effective, while increasing learning speed and knowledge retention. Through these capabilities, Squint enables organizations to digitize standard operating procedures using just a mobile phone, with no hassle (not even an IT team), making everyday tasks like training, operation, and maintenance faster and safer.
The flexibility of the Squint platform is a selling point for customers. And Squint offers the only AR solution that is truly open world – which means that content can be created anywhere, on the spot, without needing a QR code or a 3D model to detect objects and orient itself. The implementation with Squint is simple and self-serve, thus offering the fastest time-to-value in the manufacturing technology sector.
Squint’s customer roster – including global brands like Siemens and The Volvo Group – speaks to the value of the company’s solution. Plus early customers report an 86% decrease in training time for new operators.
Squint was founded in 2021 by CEO Devin Bhushan – who led AR products at Splunk and built mobile apps at Yahoo Sports and Flurry.
KEY QUOTES:
“We see Squint completely transforming our training process on the factory floor. It enables our workforce to learn with immersive spatial guides that boost productivity and, most importantly, encourage safety.”
— Rachel Wood, the Learning & Development Site Lead at Siemens Spartanburg
“I first met Devin at Yahoo, and we also worked together at Splunk; he’s always stood out as an exceptional engineer with a great eye for design. At Splunk, Devin led the development of our AR products. The number one request from customers was to bring more of their existing data and operational insights into AR. This led to the spark of an incredible business idea, so I was excited to bring Devin into our startup studio, Menlo Labs, to help put Squint on a path to success.” It was within Menlo Labs that the vision for Squint was validated, and manufacturing emerged as the first application for the platform.”
— Tim Tully, Menlo Ventures partner and Squint board member
“What drew us to Squint was the combination of an outlier founder in Devin, whose background makes him a leading expert in enterprise AR, and a compelling value proposition that is clearly resonating with large enterprise customers like Siemens, Volvo, and more. Squint uses mobile AR, computer vision, and machine learning to replace paper binders, sticky notes, and human trainings. The way it optimizes factory procedures is incredibly powerful and has the potential to increase factory operations, transforming the way workers interact with machines and applications even beyond the factory floor.”
— Jess Lee, partner at Sequoia
