RealWear Raises $23.5 Million to Turn Successful Industrial Wearable into High Growth Assisted Intelligence Platform Business
RealWear, the world’s leading provider of assisted reality solutions for frontline industrial workers, announced that it closed its Series C for $23.5 Million. Led by Foundry Group, the new raise enables RealWear to shift and expand from a hardware-centric to a platform-centric company, creating even deeper connections to, and value for, its global customers.
“The funding marks the next stage of growth for the business, as we provide technology for frontline workers toward a vision of assisted intelligence where contextual data for the frontline leads to better decisions, ultimately improving operational productivity and safety,” said Andrew Chrostowski, Chairman and CEO, RealWear. “In addition to building new hardware, we will use these new funds to grow a unified software and services platform across our human-centric wearable products. Expect more game-changing tech to come.”
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Currently, 41 of Fortune 100 companies are using RealWear devices for business resiliency, productivity, training and employee engagement including Mars Petcare, Goodyear, Colgate-Palmolive and ExxonMobil. RealWear partners will be able to tie into our cloud systems to improve their understanding of app performance and aggregate device utilization.
RealWear will introduce the vision for Assisted Intelligence for the first time at AWE. At the booth, RealWear will be previewing the following using RealWear Navigator 500:
- IBM Inspector Wearable – real-time image and reality matching assisted reality solution for the automotive industry using AI with computer vision and machine learning to identify manufacturing defects in real-time for frontline workers.
- Transition Technologies PSC with SLAM – label assets as digital overlays anchored to physical assets within a 2.5D environment. The system will display real-time IoT sensor data and images including pressure readouts.
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At the end of last year RealWear launched its next generation assisted reality device, RealWear Navigator™ 500, which is the first commercially available head-worn device with a modular design.
“RealWear delivers real customer value through its line of assisted reality products. They empower the frontline workforce, providing them information and expertise in real-time that brings value to large global organizations whose priorities are productivity and safety,” said Brad Feld, partner at Foundry Group. “This new investment will allow RealWear to expand its hardware, software and cloud offerings.”
Former investors also joined this round, including Qualcomm Ventures, Kopin and Columbia Ventures Corporation. According to global technology intelligence firm ABI Research, total enterprise smart glasses shipments will grow at a 63% CAGR over the next five years, with over 27 million shipments seen in 2027. RealWear’s position as a platform-centric business will provide customers new tools and insights of whole-fleet utilization and the associated workflows.
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