Discord Acquires Augmented Reality Startup Ubiquity6

ugmented reality startup Ubiquity6, has raised tens of millions from investors and executed a pretty substantial pivot earlier this year. Now, the company has been acquired by gaming chat app giant Discord.

The AR startup raised $37.5 million from rounds of funding from investors including Benchmark, First Round, Kleiner Perkins and Google’s Gradient Ventures , for the startup's vision of creating a consumer facing platform which hosts augmented reality content. The company’s most recent publicly disclosed financing was a $27 million Series B in October of 2018.

The exact terms of the Discord acquisition have not been disclosed, however in recent months the startup seemed to abandon most of the products it had spent its first several years building, suggesting that Ubiquity6 had been having some issues finding wide audiences for its products.

When the Ubiquity6 launched back in 2017, the company wanted to build an app that would be the go to way for smartphone users to access augmented reality content. At the end of 2019, the startup launched a product called Displayland, which aimed to gamify the process of 3D scanning physical environments with a smartphone’s camera. By 2020, the company had 65 employees. 

However in recent months, the company has made a dramatic transformation, stopping all work on augmented reality to focus on developing a desktop platform which allows users to play simple online party games together remotely. The beta platform, called Backyard, was designed for pandemic era habits that seem to be on the decline as the US springs back into action. Backyard was discontinued this week as part of the acquisition announcement.

In one post shared by Medium, CEO of Ubiquity6 Midha, appeared to downplay any expectations that Ubiquity6’s augmented reality technology will be living on inside Discord, stating:

“Our mission at Ubiquity6 has always been to unlock new ways for people to connect through shared experiences… Joining Discord today allows us to accelerate that mission — Ubiquity6’s team, Backyard product and multiplayer technology will be integrated into Discord.”