When Trace ‘s future co-founders, Greg Tran, Martin Smith, and Sean Couture, joined Magic Leap in Spring/Summer 2015, the startup scene was buzzing with excitement. With years of keeping things under wraps, the augmented reality company managed to captivate the attention of Silicon Valley by showcasing in-device footage and ended the year on a high note with an impressive $827 million raise.
The narrative of the intervening years revolves around a well-funded and highly promising startup that faced challenges in identifying its target market. Tran departed from his creative director position in January 2020, followed by Couture in July 2020 and Smith in February 2021.
Trace was established in 2021, with Tran, Smith, and Couture assuming the positions of CEO, CTO, and head of 3D art, respectively. The startup, which creates location-based branded augmented reality experiences, emerged as a result of Magic Leap’s initial challenges with content.
“Making AR content can be quite challenging,” Tran explains to Eltrys. It’s still quite early in the ecosystem. There were numerous partners involved with Magic Leap. Creating content used to be a time-consuming process, requiring the expertise of developers, 3D artists, and entire teams of people. We recognized a chance to streamline that process.
Trace is a smaller company compared to Magic Leap. Aside from the three founders, the company also has a small group of contractors on board. Magic Leap has secured over $4 billion in funding. Meanwhile, Rev1 Ventures and Impellent Ventures will co-lead Trace’s $2 million pre-seed announcement this week. The company has already partnered with well-known companies such as Qualcomm, Telefónica, T-Mobile, and Lenovo.
If you were present at Mobile World Congress this year, you may have encountered Deutsche Telekom’s impressive AR experience. Maybe you caught a glimpse of the mixed reality offering it created for the Hip Hop 50 Summit in New York last year.
Trace’s offering revolves around a creator app that simplifies the process of integrating AR content into a physical environment. Tran compares it to Squarespace, a platform for creating AR experiences. Once set up, users can conveniently access the digital content either through Trace’s app or a web browser.
Trace has limited the creator experience to a private beta, but plans to make it available to the public in the coming months. When that occurs, businesses will have the opportunity to create experiences as part of a subscription-based service.
One way the company shares similarities with Magic Leap is its emphasis on serving enterprise clients.
“The partners we’ve had so far have been some of these big brand companies,” Tran explains. “Our primary focus is on establishing partnerships with enterprise-level companies first.” From our perspective, there seems to be greater potential in the enterprise market at the moment, although this product does have a consumer-facing aspect to it.
