Apple and Google’s move into smart augmented reality several years ago, creating ways for people to use their smartphone cameras to recognize everyday objects in order to interact with them, put the technology on the map with everyday consumers and enable businesses to create new experiences. serve them. It also laid the groundwork for creating new frontiers in visual search.
Strabismus is one of the startups capitalizing on this idea with what founder and CEO Devin Bhushan describes as “a platform that connects people with the right information at the right time.”
Now focusing on business users, it has created a simple and fast way for organizations to create AR-based workflows: users pointing their smartphone or tablet cameras at physical objects in the work environment — whether those objects are “smart” and connected or not — can enable detailed, step-by-step instructions for using these machines, log sheets to record maintenance or other tasks, and more, and can use AI-based interactions to even understand what have to know.
Squint to date has attracted several large enterprise customers who use it to manage workflows in factories and other industrial facilities, including Volvo, Siemens, Colgate-Palmolive, Michelin and Berkshire Hathaway Energy. Now, to fuel its business growth and more technology development, Squint is announcing a $13 million Series A round led by Sequoia with participation from Menlo Ventures.
B2B is its initial target, but contrary to its name, Squint has a broader focus. Its ultimate goal, Bhushan said, is to “eliminate the search bar and eliminate all that time we spend looking for information and data.”
Bhushan first came up with the idea for the company when he was working in a very different kind of business: he was director of engineering at Splunk, where he helped conceive and build Splunk AR, a way for users of the company’s data analytics tools to map this data directly to physical machines to better understand how they worked in real time.
The idea was to expand Splunk’s addressable customer base to more non-technical users.
“People really loved it, but they didn’t have that many use cases to just visualize Splunk data,” he recalls. But he was seeing customers trying to use the AR tool for other kinds of workflows outside of what Splunk handled on the data side, and that made Bhushan’s corporate antennae twitch. We’re on to something with this idea, he thought to himself. “I think we can really bring AR to the masses. Unlocked.”
Bhushan left Splunk in 2021 to pursue this idea by founding Squint. He said that while working at Splunk made him think about the bigger problem, Squint’s goals, and the path to achieving them, are very distinct.
“At Splunk we never solved the problem of allowing data and information to come in from anywhere, and we also never solved the authoring problem (as it would just allow you to scan your device and see metrics),” he said. “At Squint we have innovated in the object detection department and also in content creation.” For example, computer vision and object detection are used to turn videos into AR processes, he added.
“We also wrote it entirely from scratch, using more of our time at Splunk as a learning experience.”
There are already a number of ways in the market to help those working in industrial or other practical roles. If a business already equips workers with headsets or tablets, they may have apps preloaded on them, or they may stick QR codes on the machines themselves. The most common approach was very analog: instruction manuals and recording logs when people need to verify their work.
The advantage of Squint’s solution, Bhushan said, is that it is more dynamic and specific: a business can easily create workflows and link them to very specific actions that users need to take and to specific areas of a machine’s system. The artificial intelligence in the system covers not only computer vision for object recognition, but also the workflows a person can go through and the genetic artificial intelligence that provides the ability to ask questions and receive answers from the platform.
Bhushan’s first stop as a founder was to incubate the company at Menlo Ventures, as part of the Menlo Labs product: his connection was Tim Tully, a partner at the company who was Splunk’s CTO and thus worked closely with Bhushan there.
Squint in turn met the Sequoia team when she was in a cohort of Arc, Sequoia VC’s early-stage program for finding and mentoring outlier startups. (Menlo and Sequoia are both previous investors As a result.)
But Bhushan goes back even further with Jess Lee, the Sequoia partner who helps run Arc: the two were together at Yahoo nearly a decade ago. He described the first time he saw Devin demonstrate how Squint worked as a “moment of intuitive magic,” similar to what he felt the first time he saw an AirTag, he said.
Lee believes the time is ripe to build the next generation of tools to help skilled workers do their jobs better. “When you’re put into a new job, you can find the person on the floor who can tell you what to do, or you can go to a warehouse to find a binder or wing it. Or, you can take out your phone and that can help you figure it out,” he said.
Whether it’s accounting, machine maintenance, or something else, the key is that Squint signals how technology will eventually permeate the offline world beyond knowledge workers. In these cases, “nobody thinks about whether they’re using AI or AR,” he added.
