At Kaptivo, a company that brings technologies of image recognition, motion capture and natural language processing to the whiteboard, executives hope that the second time will be the charm.
The company, based in Cambridge, UK, and San Mateo, Calif., Started out as Light Blue Optics and had raised $ 50 million since its launch in 2004. Light Blue Optics was working on products such as the whiteboard of Kaptivo technology and interactive stylus and pen technology, which was sold earlier in the year to Promethean, a global technology educational solutions company.
With a lighter product line and a more targeted market approach, Kaptivo emerged in 2016 from the shadow of Light Blue Optics and began to seriously sell its products.
The founding CEO, Nic Lawrence (the former director of Light Blue Optics) even managed to attract investors from his former start-up company in Kaptivo, raising $ 6 million in fresh capital from Draper Esprit , Benhamou Global Ventures and Generation Ventures.
"The common theme was the user interfaces," said Lawrence. "We saw the need for a new category of products, sold some of our business and invested all our money in Kaptivo."
What was originally a commercial licensing technology, Lawrence saw a huge market open up on technologies that could turn the humble whiteboard into a powerful tool for digital business intelligence with the ability to create a business. application of standard technology and proprietary Kaptivo software.
Kaptivo's technology does more than just create a video of a conference room, says Lawrence.
"In real time, we remove people from the scene and improve the content written on the board," he said. "
Optical character recognition allows users to scribble on a whiteboard and Kaptivo's software will make the difference between text and images. The company's subscription service will even convert the text into other languages.
The company has a core product and a three-year cloud subscription that it sells for $ 999. That's a lot less than the thousands of dollars that an upscale smart conferencing system would cost, according to Lawrence. The hardware alone costs $ 699, and a one-year subscription to its cloud computing services sells for $ 120, Lawrence added.
Kaptivo has already sold more than 2,000 devices worldwide and has secured major OEM partners such as HP, according to a statement. Kaptivo's clients include BlueJeans, Atlassian and Deloitte, as well as educational institutions, including George Washington University, Stanford University, and the Florida Institute of Technology.
The product is integrated with Slack and Trello video conferencing and BlueJeans, said Lawrence. In the first quarter of 2018 alone, the company sold about 5,000 units.
The vision is "to increase every existing whiteboard," Lawrence said. "You can bring [the whiteboard] into the 21st century with one of them.Workers can show us all their visual creativity in the course of a remote meeting."