3-D Imaging Firm Matterport Raises $30 Million For Mobile Push

As virtual reality headsets such as Samsung Gear, Google's Cardboard, and hotly anticipated devices from Magic Leap and Facebook's Oculus Rift have gotten big press lately, one question is what we'll actually do on these things besides play even cooler games.

Matterport, which last year started selling a $4,500 3-D scanning camera currently aimed mainly at real estate firms that want to provide a more immersive experience for potential buyers, hopes to enable a lot more applications to be created more easily. Today, the Mountain View-based company announced it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round led by Qualcomm Ventures to build out that vision.

The company plans to use the money in part to develop software to make it possible for almost anyone to capture 3-D content using future tablets and smartphones that incorporate 3-D sensors. In particular, CEO Bill Brown said in an interview, "We want to make it very easy for third-party apps to create and use this type of content." Today, Matterport began accepting applications to its developer program.

As much buzz as Magic Leap, Oculus, and other VR devices have gotten, compelling content and apps will be key to making them the mass-market product that their makers keep insisting they will be. As Ben Miller, director of content development at WEVR, a VR studio in Venice, Calif., put it recently, there is no killer app for VR yet.

Matterport has found one that, if it isn't a killer, is at least promising: real estate. Its camera is mounted on a tripod in various locations in a house or apartment to take 3-D scans, and Matterport's software via a cloud-based service knits the images together in an hour or so to produce a virtual-reality-style tour of the interior. It's mainly on VR devices for now, though a browser-based app called 3D Showcase allows the content to be viewed on computers and mobile devices. "Simply being able to embed this content into a Web browser is really important," Brown says.

Brown thinks making it easier to both capture and view 3-D immersive content will open up potential markets such as construction management, insurance claims adjustment, and restaurants (like the one in the video above), as well as advertising and entertainment. Since launching last year, Matterport Spaces, as the company calls them, have topped a million views a month.

Also participating in the new funding round are a new investor--GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund--and a long list of previous investors: Lux Capital, DCM Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Greylock Partners, Navitas Capital, AMD Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, iGlobe Partners, Rothenberg Ventures, Sling Media founder Blake Krikorian, and Crate & Barrel founder Gordon Segal. It has raised $56 million to date.