When Trace's future co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith, and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in spring/summer 2015, the startup's profile was about the same. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captivated Silicon Valley's imagination with in-device footage and ended the year with $827 million in funding.
The story of the intervening years has been one of highly-promising startups being heavily funded and struggling to find market fit. Mr. Tran stepped down as creative director in January 2020, and Mr. Couture and Mr. Smith retired in July 2020 and February 2021, respectively.
Trace was founded in 2021, with Tran, Smith, and Couture assuming the roles of CEO, CTO, and Head of 3D Art, respectively. The startup is building branded, location-based augmented reality experiences and is the result of Magic Leap's early content struggles.
“AR content is really hard to create,” Tran tells TechCrunch. “We're really early in the ecosystem. Magic Leap had a lot of partners. If you want to create content, you need a whole team of development and 3D art experts, and it takes three to six people to create it. We thought there was an opportunity to make that process much easier.”
Trace is a much more modest company than Magic Leap. In addition to his three founders, the company employs several contractors. Magic Leap has now raised more than $4 billion. Meanwhile, Trace this week announced a $2 million pre-seed, co-led by Rev1 Ventures and Impellent Ventures. Still, the company has already partnered with notable companies such as Qualcomm, Telefonica, T-Mobile, and Lenovo.
Image credit: Trace
If you attended Mobile World Congress this year, you may have come across the AR experience that Mobile World Congress built for Deutsche Telekom. Or maybe you saw the mixed reality service built for the Hip Hop 50 Summit in New York last year.
Trace's products are centered around creator apps designed to easily add AR content to real-world spaces. Tran likens this to his Squarespace for AR experiences. Once deployed, the user will be able to access digital content through his Trace app or his web browser.
Until now, the creator experience was limited to a private beta, but Trace plans to make it publicly available in the coming months. Once that happens, companies will be able to create experiences as part of a subscription-based service.
However, one thing the company is very much in line with Magic Leap is its focus on enterprise customers.
“The partners we've worked with in the past have been some of the big brand names,” Tran says. “We are initially focusing on some of our enterprise-level partners. […] This is a consumer product in some ways, but we now see more opportunities in the enterprise space. ”