Tiger Global leads Series B for India's Avataar

Sequoia Capital India, which provided a USD 7m Series A in 2020, re-upped. Total funding since the company’s inception in 2014 comes to about USD 55.5m.

Avataar claims its technology is used by the largest global e-commerce marketplaces and leading direct-to-consumer brands, although it has declined to disclose specific clients. The idea is to help shoppers inspect products that are difficult to market online such as furniture with life-sized 3D representations using AR.

This can be done at home using a smart phone, with no goggles required. However, AR glasses and wearables can also be used to enhance the experience. For example, refrigerator shoppers can drop virtual versions of the appliance in their own kitchens and walk around to evaluate the look and feel in true life-size.

Customers can also toggle between available colours, open and close the doors, and compare multiple refrigerator types side-by-side. Meanwhile, e-commerce clients receive insights from consumer analytics.

Avataar envisions use-cases beyond e-commerce and describes its platform as an “inside engine” for enabling Web 3.0 and metaverse-related applications. Web 3.0 and the metaverse, often used interchangeably, refer to a decentralized vision of the internet with immersive virtual environments.

“More than 60% of human sensory neural processing is visual in nature, and the lack of spatial depth on flat screens today drives a big experience gap between the digital – static 2D images and videos – and the physical world experiences,” Sravanth Aluru, founder and CEO of Avataar, said in a statement.

“The digital world is undergoing a fundamental shift from static 2D content to a life-size virtual 3D world which is dynamic and superimposable onto our shared physical reality. For the first time in history, we are now able to detect, understand, augment and manipulate consumers’ physical reality using a live camera feed.”

Avataar said the “digital and digitally influenced marketplace” is expected to be worth USD 18trn by 2025. This represents a monetization opportunity of more than USD 50bn over the next decade for the underlying platforms driving the 2D-to-3D shift.

“The metaverse is already here, just not evenly distributed,” Shailesh Lakhani, a managing director at Sequoia, added. “Avataar is leading the way in bringing scale creation capabilities to the largest brands to enable commerce – an application with tremendous promise in AR/VR environments.”

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Technology
• Early-stage
• India
• Tiger Global Management
• Sequoia Capital
• e-commerce
• Web 3.0
• metaverse