Illumix raises $8.6 million in seed funding to make advanced AR games

Illumix

• Illumix, a Silicon Valley-based startup, is building
  augmented reality games and the technology needed to run
  them.
• It’s attracted $8.6 million in seed funding from
  top-tier venture capital firms. 
• Its investors believe that the founder’s background in
  math and machine learning can help the games Illumix makes
  stand out in a world of games using off-the-shelf AR software
  like Apple’s ARkit. 

Giant companies like Google and Apple are betting heavily on
augmented reality, an emerging technology that enables advanced
graphics to be integrated into the real world through your
phone’s camera lens. 

But top-tier venture capital firms are backing a smaller company,
Illumix, that’s working on the same vision: building the
underlying core technology — and focusing on games as one of the
first applications for the technology.

“We are designing first and foremost for: What is the user doing?
I think we’ve come up with a very distinct tech stack,” Illumix
founder and CEO Kirin Sinha said in an interview. 

“No one knows what a great AR app looks or feels like, to this
day, if you ask any consumer what is a great AR experience, most
people don’t know. Most people haven’t experienced that before,”
she continued. “All great content and great applications start
with the mentality — what should I do, what is missing, and that
is very central to how we have looked at every piece of
technology we have developed.”

Illumix announced on Tuesday that it had raised $8.6 million in
seed funding from firms led by Maveron and Lightspeed Venture
Partners.

The first products from Illumix will be a pair of games for
smartphones released next year, Sinha said. One is going to be an
original title, and the other will used licensed intellectual
property from a big game company in the survival horror genre,
she said. 

“We are going to see real adoption of AR when there are
meaningful, retentive AR experiences, that people start to use
every day on their smartphones,” Sinha said. “Our goal as a
company for right now is to be the premier AR studio, and we are
dead set on the applications. If it’s not fun, the party is
over.”

One reason that these investors are betting on Illumix is because
it’s building its own computer vision technology, or the ability
to use a smartphone camera to identify where objects and walls
are in the room around the user. 

“There are lots of companies — Apple and Google, companies that
Sand Hill Road is investing in — they’re really building
developer tools,” Nicole Quinn, partner at Lightspeed Venture
Capital, said in an interview. “It’s very different from what
Illumix is doing.”

“They’re taking a vertically integrated approach, building out
very strong technology that we have not seen elsewhere,” Quinn
continued. “A lot of others in AR are basically going to be
using ARkit, and we think if everyone is just building a game on
top of ARkit, then they are going to be similar to one another,
but Illumix will be differentiated and unique.”

A pure math background 

Part of the reason why Illumix is building its own technology —
not an easy task — is because its founder, Sinha, is used to
tackling difficult problems.

Her career started in academia focusing on math and machine
learning research, specifically, at a series of prestigious
institutions including MIT, Cambridge, and the London School of
Economics. 

But it was an accidental company that turned her attention to
entrepreneurship. She founded Shine for Girls, a national
nonprofit focusing on math advocacy for middle school girls, in
2012. It ended up taking off, to Sinha’s surprise. 

So she ended up going to business school, and looking to start a
company. Lightspeed helped out — she was accepted to its
fellowship, which included a bit of money as well as other
resources like mentors and startup classes.

It also ended up giving her some early office space. Instead of
the apocryphal Silicon Valley garage, Illumix — originally called
The Looking Glass — got started in the Lightspeed offices. 

“We were actually camped out in Lightspeed’s old offices, they
did not realize we were there for a solid year,” Sinha said.
“They gave us the access when we were summer fellows, and then I
started hiring people, and telling that this was our official
address.”

“It was pretty awkward, Lightspeed was like ‘Oh, can we come to
your offices,” and I was like, ‘Uh, you’ll recognize the
address,'” she joked. 

Now Illumix has about 11 employees, counts several top-tier firms
including Radar Partners, Unusual Ventures, and 451 Media as
investors, and it’s putting together a team full of experts in
computer vision, gaming, and design.

Plus, it’s not just working on technology for the short term —
Sinha has a vision for when AR technology comes off of the phone
and starts being integrated into glasses or other dedicated
augmented reality technology. 

“If you see a true consumer headset, glasses or contacts, 10-20
years in the future, I think that’s the biggest entertainment
opportunity has ever seen, bar none,” Sinha said.