Jido Maps

Jido Maps, established in 2017 by Mark Stauber and Jaeyong Sung, operates at the intersection of augmented reality and computer vision. The company was founded with the mission to enable consumer devices, like smartphones, to intelligently interpret their physical surroundings. This vision originated from the founders' shared background in robotics and artificial intelligence at the Stanford AI Lab, where Stauber focused on hardware and Sung specialized in deep learning for robot interaction with human environments. Based in Berkeley, California, the company participated in the Y Combinator Winter 2018 batch and was subsequently acquired.

The core of Jido Maps' business was a development platform centered around a simple API designed for creating persistent and shared augmented reality experiences. This technology allowed digital content to be saved in a specific physical location, enabling users to revisit the AR experience across different sessions and devices. It also facilitated synchronized AR sessions for multiple users, ensuring everyone could view and interact with the same virtual objects in a shared space. The company's business model focused on providing this API to developers and businesses, particularly in the retail sector, to create contactless, physical-to-digital shopping experiences where customers could use their own devices to interact with products. The platform aimed to transform any visual or scanned data into a deployed computer vision model, with applications ranging from security camera monitoring and automated data entry to mobile product scanning.

Financially, Jido Maps secured a total of $2.22 million in funding over two rounds. This included an initial accelerator round of $120,000 on March 20, 2018, followed by a significant seed round of $2.1 million on July 19, 2018. The seed round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from other institutional investors such as Y Combinator and Brightstone Venture Capital. Jido, Inc. was ultimately acquired by Roblox, a major player in the video game and virtual worlds industry, further validating the significance of its spatial computing and AR technology.

Keywords: augmented reality API, persistent AR, computer vision platform, shared AR, spatial computing, Y Combinator W18, retail AR, contactless shopping, 3D space mapping, robotics AI, deep learning, visual data interpretation, mobile product scanning, Mark Stauber, Jaeyong Sung, Khosla Ventures, Roblox acquisition, physical-to-digital, AR development platform, user synchronization AR