When future Trace co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in the Spring/Summer of 2015, it was about as hot as startups come. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captured the imagination of Silicon Valley with footage inside the device, before closing the year with $827 million in revenue.
The story of the intervening years is one of a crowdfunded and highly promising startup struggling to find the right market. Tran stepped down from the creative director role in January 2020, while Couture and Smith left in July 2020 and February 2021, respectively.
Trace was founded in 2021, with Tran, Smith and Couture taking on the respective roles of CEO, CTO and Head of 3D Art. The startup, which creates location-based augmented reality experiences, is a product of some of Magic Leap’s early content battles.
“It’s really hard to create AR content,” Tran tells TechCrunch. “It’s very early in the ecosystem. There were many partners with Magic Leap. Whenever they wanted to create content, it would take three to six months to do it, requiring development and 3D art experts and entire teams of people. We saw an opportunity to make this process much easier.”
Trace is a much more modest company than Magic Leap. In addition to its three founders, the company employs a handful of contractors. Magic Leap’s funding now exceeds $4 billion. Trace, on the other hand, is announcing a $2 million pre-seed this week, led by Rev1 Entrepreneurs and Business Enterprises. However, the company has already partnered with some high-profile names, including Qualcomm, Telefónica, T-Mobile and Lenovo.
Image Credits: Trace
If you attended Mobile World Congress this year, you may have come across the AR experience he created for Deutsche Telekom. Or maybe you saw the mixed reality she delivered for the Hip Hop 50 Summit last year in New York.
Trace’s offering focuses on a creator app designed to easily add AR content to a real space. Tran likens it to a Squarespace for AR experiences. Once installed, a user can access the digital content through Trace’s app or a web browser.
The creator experience has so far been limited to a private beta, but Trace expects to open it up to the public in the coming months. When that happens, companies will be able to produce experiences as part of a subscription-based offering.
One way the company is very much in line with Magic Leap, however, is its focus on enterprise customers.
“The partners we’ve had so far have been some of these big brand companies,” says Tran. “We’re focusing on some of these enterprise-level partners first […] This is a consumer product, in a sense, but we see more opportunities in the enterprise space right now.”
