3D sensor maker Occipital gets $13 Million in Series B funding

Software startup Occipital has announced that the company received a round of funding from a group of investors.

TechCrunch reports that the Series B funding worth $13 million was raised from investors Intel Capital, Shea Ventures, Grishin Robotics, and Foundry Group, who had previously participated in the first round of funding for Occipital.

Occipital's funding now stands at $21 million after this recent round of investments.

Jeff Powers, Occipital's CEO and Co-founder, said that the new round of investments will let the company "rapidly advance the Structure platform, and accelerate initiatives to bring spatial computing to everyday life."

The Structure platform is Occipital's foremost product; a combination of a 3D sensor that clips to the back of an iPad, and its accompanying software kit. Introduced in 2013, the Structure 3D sensor generates a 3D depth map, and the software transforms that information into 3D user interfaces and models. Occipital also offers a 360-degree panorama app for iOS, one of its earlier products.

Powers explained that although the company's platform is increasingly being adopted across different industries, such as architecture, medicine, visual effects and 3D printing, Occipital is looking beyond what Structure can do so far, and use it for virtual and augmented reality applications.  

"We feel we're just at the beginning of what our software can do," Powers said. "When we launched Structure SDK, it could not even capture objects in color.  Now we can capture photorealistic large objects, and explore environments with unbounded tracking.  The SDK is only dubbed version '0.5,' so expect it to get much more rich [sic] as we approach 1.0."

Occipital knows that the technology they are developing is a promising one, and hopes that their early start gives them a unique advantage in the market - especially since Google is said to be developing its own computer vision and 3D mapping technology, called Project Tango.