Nextech AR Solutions Corp said it has closed the previously announced acquisition of UK-based spatial computing company ARWAY Ltd, in an all-stock transaction.
The deal will also see Nextech hire key founders Baran Korkmaz and Nikhil Sawlani.
ARWAY’s spatial mapping platform uses AI to scan and recognize surroundings for hyper-accurate location-based 3D mapping.
According to Nextech, “the acquisition provides a spatial mapping platform critical to building “mini-metaverses”, which the company is actively pursuing and believes is a market opportunity as big as the metaverse itself.”
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The metaverse is described as a virtually shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space.
The augmentation of reality and the metaverse have been popular topics this year, as industry leaders such as Facebook, Epic Games, Microsoft and others have all identified the metaverse as the future of the internet and computing itself.
Nextech plans to take a leadership position in the space with the combination of ARway’s AR cloud and 3D mapping technologies com and Nextech's scalable solutions for AR e-commerce, AR advertising, HoloX Human Holograms and AR Portals.
“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,” Evan Gappelberg, CEO of Nextech AR Solutions said in a statement.
“With (Nextech's) global sales and marketing machine, our combined AI teams and our existing AR tech and resources as a public company, I feel confident that we will quickly take a leadership position in the AR metaverse!” he added.
ARway CEO and co-founder Baran Korkmaz will be joining Nextech AR as product manager, AR, and ARway co-founder Nikhil Sawlani will be brought on as software engineer, AR.
“I believe this will be a historic moment in the development of the Metaverse, a vision that started over four years ago with ARway,” said Korkmaz. “Unifying human-machine understanding by connecting the digital and physical world to empower people to connect and share in deeper, more meaningful ways. And this vision is now becoming a reality with our new family at Nextech."
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