August 10, 2021 – Nextech AR Solutions, a provider of augmented reality (AR) for eCommerce, AR learning applications, has today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire UK-based spatial computing company ARway Ltd. Nextech will acquire ARway for approximately USD $1 million in an all-stock transaction, and will also hire the key founders Baran Korkmaz and Nikhil Sawlani. Nextech stated that the acquisition will provide it with a spatial mapping platform critical to building the metaverse.
Through Unity, optimized for Google and Apple, and by using AI to recognize surroundings for hyper-accurate location mapping, ARway provides users an augmented reality software development kit (SDK) to frame the digital world in a few minutes. The company’s AR cloud and 3D mapping technologies will now be combined with Nextech’s scalable solutions for AR e-commerce, AR advertising, HoloX Human Holograms and AR Portals.
Facebook, Epic Games, Microsoft and others have all identified the metaverse as the future of the internet and computing itself. Nextech stated that the acquisition will position the company in what it’s calling the ‘mini-metaverse’ business.
Evan Gappelberg, CEO of Nextech AR Solutions commented: “We think that the mini-metaverse business use case is here to stay, and the implications for future growth are significant. Nextech’s mini-metaverse offering will be available to brands and companies that want to create mini-metaverses based on a geolocation like museums, corporate headquarters, theme parks, sports stadiums, University Campuses and more. We can scan these spaces with ARway’s technology and drop in AR experiences that are triggered based on geolocation, making for a fully immersive Metaverse experience. The mini-metaverse is the first step toward universal mapping, a concept that while not a reality today, is a future inevitability. Nextech’s mini-metaverse offering will enable people to experience the multiverse as it increasingly becomes a normal part of everyday life.”
The ARway SDK combines mapping technologies for location persistent AR experiences across ARkit, ARcore and Microsoft Azure Spatial Anchors, delivered on cross-platforms Unity, Unreal, Android Studio or Xcode/Swift soon, to unlock spatial computing within a single toolkit for iOS, Android and Hololens. According to Nextech, ARway has been creating persistence location experiences such as indoor navigation, guided tours, treasure hunts and more with its no-code platform and has developed an ecosystem with over 1,000+ developers, having created 3D maps in over 60 countries.
Gappelberg added: “Creating the metaverse is the most ambitious thing we can accomplish as an augmented reality company, and now with the ARway platform plus Baran and Nikhil joining the Nextech team, we are positioned to do just that. The potential for Nextech to be first to market with mini-metaverses, spatial maps as NFT’s in the metaverse and leveraging our creator platform HoloX to populate the metaverse with content at scale is super exciting to me.”
Baran Korkmaz, CEO Co-founder of ARway said: “As the future of augmented reality is inevitable, in this new age of Web 3.0, Mixed Reality and wearable cameras, it will be a large effort to map the physical world. And just like today’s web, there will be various use cases, proprietary data, walled gardens, and permission layers. So I’m super excited to be joining Nextech, where we will be at the next tech frontier”.
The transaction is subject to the approval of ARway stockholders, regulatory approval (including acceptance of the CSE and the NEO exchanges) and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close August 2021.
For more information on Nextech, click here. To find out more about ARway, click here.
Image / video credit: Nextech AR Solutions / YouTube
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.