Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Matterport has raised $30 million in growth funding from Qualcomm and Singapore’s GIC to expand its virtual reality and augmented reality content creation platform.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Matterport makes a $4,500 Pro Camera that can capture an environment in 360 degrees. It also makes the cloud software to stitch the content into a virtual reality or augmented reality experience. The target market has been realtors looking to show off homes for sale in 3D.
“We’re making sure we have a platform where it’s easy to deliver VR experiences and also gives consumers the ability to create VR experiences themselves,” said Bill Brown, CEO of Matterport, in an interview with Fortune.
The VR videos are easy to embed in any web site. When someone clicks on it, they see a still image that captures the view from a particular part of a home or tourist location, akin to Google Street View. But you can move on to another point inside the location quickly, just by clicking on the environment.
“What Matterport does particularly well is we convey what it feels like to be in a space,” says Brown. “When you’re thinking about buying a home, the biggest tool people use now … is time. They drive all over the place , because that’s the only way to get a feeling of what it’s like to be in the space. What we do is try to give an immersive feeling to significantly reduce the amount of time they have to use to get a feel.”
Matterport began selling the application platform for realtors in July 2014. So far, Brown said that the company has sold thousands of VR cameras to real estate agents, and those videos are getting about 1.2 million unique views per month. Most of the major brokerage companies are customers.
Over time, Brown hopes to reduce the cost of content creation and eventually enable consumers with 3D-sensor-enabled smartphones to record and publish their own virtual reality visual experiences. A consumer could, for instance, create a virtual tour of their own home.
Matterport has raised $56 million to date, and it now has more than 80 employees. And Brown said the company is starting to target other markets for its technology, such as e-commerce, advertising, retail, architecture, travel, construction, insurance, entertainment media, and journalism.
Existing investors include Lux Capital, DCM Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Navitas Capital, AMD Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, iGlobe Partners, Rothenberg Ventures, Sling Media founder Blake Krikorian, and Crate & Barrel founder Gordon Segal.
About the author: Mike Wheatley is the senior editor at Realty Biz News. Got a real estate related news article you wish to share, contact Mike at [email protected].
