Discord acquires augmented actuality startup Ubiquity6 – TechCrunch

After elevating tens of thousands and thousands from traders and executing a fairly substantial pivot earlier this 12 months, augmented actuality startup Ubiquity6 and its crew have been acquired by gaming chat app large Discord.

The formidable AR startup had raised $37.5 million from a sequence of high traders together with Benchmark, First Round, Kleiner Perkins and Google’s Gradient Ventures who had been betting on its imaginative and prescient of constructing a consumer-facing platform for internet hosting augmented actuality content material. Its most up-to-date publicly disclosed financing was a $27 million Series B in October of 2018.

Terms of the Discord acquisition weren’t disclosed, although in current months the startup appeared to desert many of the merchandise it had spent its first a number of years constructing, suggesting that Ubiquity6 had been having some points discovering broad audiences for its merchandise.

Launching again in 2017, Ubiquity6 hoped to construct an app that might be the central manner cell phone customers would browse augmented actuality content material. In late 2019, the startup launched a product called Displayland, which aimed to gamify the method of 3D scanning bodily environments with a smartphone’s digicam.

The firm’s efforts to search out mass adoption had been hampered by a cell AR market which has largely failed to realize any momentum lately regardless of hefty funding from tech giants together with Apple and Google.

In early 2020, CEO Anjney Midha instructed TechCrunch that the startup had some 65 workers.

In current months, Ubiquity6 had executed a fairly drastic pivot, leaving augmented actuality utterly behind in favor of constructing out a desktop platform that allowed customers to play easy on-line social gathering video games collectively remotely. The beta platform, referred to as Backyard, was designed for pandemic period habits that appear to be on the decline because the US springs again into motion. Backyard was discontinued this week as a part of the acquisition announcement.

In a Medium post saying the acquisition, Midha appears to downplay any expectations that Ubiquity6’s augmented actuality expertise might be residing on inside Discord.

“Our mission at Ubiquity6 has always been to unlock new ways for people to connect through shared experiences,” Midha wrote. “Joining Discord today allows us to accelerate that mission — Ubiquity6’s team, Backyard product and multiplayer technology will be integrated into Discord.”