Sturfee

Market position

Sturfee is positioned in world-scale AR localization and spatial content delivery, differentiated by its satellite-imagery-driven mapping approach. Third-party research lists comparable companies including Placenote, Summit Technology Laboratory, AiR Everywhere and Arkh.

Rather than requiring ground-level scanning of each location, Sturfee derives its city-scale fingerprint maps and 3D meshes from high-resolution satellite imagery, which it says allows cities and countries to be made AR-ready in a matter of days. Press commentary cited by the company describes the use of satellite data combined with computer vision to anchor a mesh to any place on the globe as a distinguishing feature.

Technology

Sturfee analyzes high-resolution satellite imagery to extract ground features (trees, roads, building geometry) and build a city-scale 3D mesh, then converts locations into visual fingerprints to form a machine-readable fingerprint map. Computer vision algorithms match fingerprints extracted from a device's ground camera against this map to localize the user and project the 3D mesh for AR, delivering instant localization, 3D geometry detection, multi-user interaction and persistent world anchors. Localization takes roughly three seconds over a 4G network, with a target of one second. The technology is optimized for outdoor use. Team skills span large-scale GPU programming, perception engineering, remote sensing, deep learning, satellite image processing, big data and augmented reality.

Go-to-market

Sturfee markets an SDK connecting to its VPS cloud and invites prospective customers to contact it with their application and desired coverage areas, including requests for new city coverage; it publishes demonstrations on its YouTube channel.

Developers and companies building world-scale AR applications, including social networks, entertainment apps, navigation tools, advertising, and tour guides, as well as enterprise and government buyers in smart cities; the company also cites potential non-AR users in drones and autonomous vehicles.

Geography

The company reports coverage of more than 15 AR cities across three continents. In the United States, VPS is available in San Francisco, New York City (Manhattan), San Jose, Los Angeles and several other major cities; international coverage includes Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Dubai. Headquarters are listed as Milpitas, California, US.

History

Founded in 2015 in Milpitas, California, Sturfee grew its team from the founding pair to a group whose members previously worked at organizations including Google, Niantic Labs, Intel, Amazon, Wipro, Siemens, ORNL, NGA, The Gates Foundation, NASA and NOAA. Third-party research reports total funding of $4M as of May 2019, with the most recent round of $1.3M in May 2019, and 32 employees as of February 2024.