Throw away that owner's manual: InspectAR looks at complex tech with augmented reality
St. John's startup gaining investors, clients with new software
Ever look at a computer chip and circuit board — or even your car's fuse box — and wonder what all those symbols, switches and connectors actually do?
If one St. John's tech company has its way, the days of flipping through instruction books to figure it out will soon be a thing of the past.
Matt Noseworthy is co-founder of InspectAR, which uses augmented reality to map out complicated electronics, labelling a circuit board's schematics on a screen in real time.
"What the software does is, when you point a camera at a piece of electronics, it draws a bunch of images over that piece of electronics," Noseworthy said.
"That information would otherwise take hours and hours digging through big thick manuals to find."
Watch the InspectAR demo:
The idea originated at the Centre for Entrepreneurship at Memorial University, when two other co-founders — confronted for the first time with the tedium of engineering tiny electronics — found themselves exasperated by tracking and labelling all the various transistors and diodes in front of them.
When they paired up with a software developer, a solution emerged: a program that highlights and maps out the components of whatever computer chip they might be working on, as they worked on it.
"We decided to build this as a toy first," Noseworthy said. "Then we realized, 'Wait, there's actually a big market opportunity here.'"
Noseworthy said since launching six months ago, the software has about 400 users: a success, he said, given the relative novelty of the product.
Engineers at Phillips, a multinational corporation that manufactures light bulbs, electronics and appliances, is probably their largest client so far, he said.
A couple of big investors later, and the company is now sitting on $850,000 — money Noseworthy said they'll use to grow their team.
Some of those jobs, he adds, will likely be landed by engineering hopefuls here at home.
"We are looking elsewhere, but there's a lot of talent in our beautiful province, especially with MUN right here churning out high quality engineers all the time," he said.
InspectAR is one of a swath of tech companies marking success in recent months.
St. John's-based Verafin inked a $500-million venture funding deal, the largest in Canadian history, last year for its research into crime-fighting artificial intelligence, while smart home product developer Mysa nearly doubled its number of employees.
Noseworthy said it's success stories like those that attract more tech industry talent to the province — one of the reasons InspectAR says it's banking on hiring here.
"There's plenty of talent on the island to build a big startup," he said.