Augmented Pixels, a tech startup with Ukrainian roots, has received $2 million in investment, bringing its total funding to $7 million, according to the company’s founder and CEO Vitaliy Goncharuk.
The startup, which develops virtual and augmented reality software, received money from both new and existing investors, whom the company hasn’t disclosed.
In the past, the startup raised the money from Investment Capital Ukraine, Aventures Capital, 408 Ventures, Steltec Capital, The Hive, and T. Ravi among other investors.
The company plans to expand its team in the United States, where it’s based, and to further develop its navigation software. The company works on enabling robots to navigate in space on their own without GPS, and on 3D mapping, a technology used to turn real objects into their three-dimensional virtual representations — these can be buildings, small indoor objects, theatrical stages and others.
The technologies developed by the company promise to “significantly reduce the cost of operations in logistics, facility management and other markets,” Goncharuk said in the company’s statement on Feb. 1.
Goncharuk founded the company in 2010 in Ukraine’s southern city Odesa. Since then, the startup has been working with electronics giants LG, Intel and Qualcomm, as well as other companies.
The company’s headquarters moved to Palo Alto, California, in 2014, but two of its development offices remain in Ukraine, where it employs up to 80 people.
In 2016, Augmented Pixels was acknowledged as one of the largest contributors to computer vision — a field of science focused on how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or video — along with giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Sony.
