Blippar

Founder/s: Omar Tayeb, Steve Spencer, Ambarish Mitra, Jessica Butcher
Key people: Ambarish Mitra (Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer), Omar Tayeb (Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer), Jessica Butcher (Co-Founder & Director), Dave Black (Business Development Manager), Lisa Hu (SVP), and Assieh Khamsi (Chief of Staff)
Number of employees: 251 – 500

Blippar is a technology company specializing in augmented reality, artificial intelligence and computer vision. Its flagship product, Blippar app, is a visual discovery app, harnessing augmented reality and artificial intelligence to bring the physical world to life through smartphones.

Once the Blippar app is downloaded, people can blipp (“scan”) objects they’re curious about and unlock useful and entertaining content. Since launching in the UK in 2011, Blippar has expanded rapidly, has partnered with some of the biggest and most exciting brands and media owners in the world, including Condé Nast, TIME Inc., Unilever, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Heinz, Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, L’Oréal, Universal Pictures and Jaguar.

A strong ally for brands, Blippar provides new and exciting ways to drive engagement and interaction, and for the first time offers tangible data on ROI for real-world marketing. The company offers print media an impressive value proposition: Blippar aims to reinvigorate the industry by adding more value to existing content, bridging the physical world with the digital one, and bringing static, flat content to real-time, interactive life.

Blippar also has a self-service platform Blippbuilder, which enables license-holders – whether publishers, agencies or brands – to build blipps into their products, pages, advertising collateral quickly and simply without any help from us. The game-changing web-based program enables brands, media outlets and creative agencies to turn all their physical output – from print pages and billboards to packaging and merchandising – instantly interactive.

Determined to steer the growth of the AR industry and champion this new consumer behavior, Blippar acquired Layar in June 2014, a pioneering AR company founded in the late 2000s. The combined user base (50m+), data and technology makes Blippar the world’s most influential AR company.

In June 2015, Blippar invested in smart specs company WaveOptics. WaveOptics is developing low-energy lenses that provide a live display for the wearer but can be fitted into ordinary spectacles frames.

History

2011-2012: Founding and Launch

Blippar was founded in the U.K. in 2011 by Ambarish Mitra (Chief Executive Officer), Omar Tayeb (Chief Technology Officer), Steve Spencer (Chief Experience Officer) and Jessica Butcher (Director). The firm’s first U.S. offices opened in New York one year later.

2013: SaaS tool Blippbuilder Launch, and International Expansion

The company launched Blippbuilder, a web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool that allows businesses to create their own AR content in September.

Expanding its efforts, Blippar, opened its first Asian office in Delhi, India in February, followed by an Istanbul office.

2014: Google Glass Developments & Layar Acquisition

During the time of Google Glass, Blippar demonstrated their technology on the wearable device in March. This was the first instance of image recognition on the platform at the time. Later on, Blippar introduced games for Glass using image recognition, AR and gesture recognition. In November 2014, the company partnered with Jaguar to launch a multi-platform campaign on both mobile and Google Glass.

In June, Blippar announced that it had acquired Amsterdam-based AR pioneer Layar for an undisclosed amount. At the time, the combined companies totalled 50 million mobile app users, as well as “5,000 brands and publishers and over 100,000 self-publishing partners” in over 175 countries.

2015-2016: Visual Search Launch and Acquisitions

In 2015, The firm announced it had raised $45 million in funding from undisclosed investors.

In March 2015, the company unveiled plans to includ e new “visual search” capabilities in its app, which will allow users to perform a search for information about an object by pointing their mobile device at the object. An early proof-of-concept was shown to work on apples, dogs and cars. The company announced plans to make all American sports logos, English-language music album covers, fiction book covers, DVD cases and movie posters “blippable” by April, 2015.

In May 2015, Blippar was ranked Number 19 on CNBC’s Top Disrupter List.

In June 2015, Blippar invested in smart specs company WaveOptics. WaveOptics is developing low-energy lenses that provide a live display for the wearer but can be fitted into ordinary spectacles frames. In October 2015, Blippar’s R&D lab launched an educational virtual reality app for Google Cardboard. On October 29, 2015 Blippar announced its acquisition of Binocular, an AR and VR app maker with a focus on Virtual Try-On.

2016-Present Day: Knowledge Graph & AR Creation Tools

In January 2016, Blippar was named on Bloomberg’s list of top UK Business Innovators and recognized by Business Insider as one of the most innovative companies in tech. In March, Blippar announced their Series D Funding Round of $54m, led by Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the strategic investment fund of the Government of Malaysia. The Financial Times named the company one of the best-funded UK start-ups.

In June 2016 Blippar launched Blipparsphere, its proprietary knowledge graph technology. Blipparsphere builds on the company’s existing machine learning and computer vision capabilities to deepen and personalize information about a user’s physical surroundings. The app analyzes the object’s characteristics and suggest what that it might be — based on its previous performance of recognizing similar objects — and then offer additional useful information about it from the web.

In November 2016, Blippar launched its self-service suite of AR creation tools. This is the first time that Blippar has made its technology publicly available to developers and others, letting them tap into Blippar’s Computer Vision API and attach their own augmented reality experiences to real-world objects. The Blippbuilder Augmented Reality Suite comes with both drag-and-drop options for marketers and designers (who don’t have coding experience) as well as a JavaScript option for developers who wish to write out their own code.

In January 2017, Blippar posted a loss of 25.8 million pounds ($31.3 million) for the 16 months to March 31, 2016, up from losses of 5 million pounds for a slightly shorter period of 12 months to Nov. 30, 2014.