PHL Inno's weekly "Startup Spotlight" feature highlights founders and new businesses cropping up in the region.
The startup: Plynth lets marketing professionals and event planners add digital and augmented reality elements to their marketing materials and experiences. Augmented reality interacts with real-world elements using digital visual technologies like smartphones to enhance the physical world.
Founded: 2020
Home base: Philadelphia
Founder: Jono Matusky, an Ardmore native who has spent time working for and building startups. He currently serves as a partner with tech consultancy firm Alongside Technology.
Matusky previously worked for the Innovadores Foundation, a Cuba-based organization that worked with technologists, artists and entrepreneurs in Havana to build an incubator program.
“I quickly saw how a lot of the tools and opportunities that technology offered — and things like augmented reality and the opportunities that being connected digitally really offered — hadn't quite appeared in areas like music and art and in the creator economy,” Matusky said. “So I started thinking about how could I make it easier for folks to add digital features or digital elements to their physical artwork.”
The product: Plynth users can create an augmented reality “layer” over their marketing materials to integrate physical and digital products. For example, users upload an image to Plynth that will be used as the base to their “portal." The QR code or link then leads viewers of their work to a video or website using augmented reality.
“One way to describe it is that you can hold your phone up to something and it comes to life like a Harry Potter painting,” Matusky said, noting the product is in early beta.
Users can go on Plynth for free and create a limited number of augmented reality experiences. For users that want access to analytics, boosted viewership or more augmented reality experiences, they can sign up for Plynth’s “pro” service tier, which costs $39 per month.
New developments in augmented reality, the metaverse and NFTs — non-fungible tokens, a one-of-a-kind digital art that can be bought or sold, with records of each transaction logged on a blockchain — are highlighting the importance of having a digital presence, Matusky said.
One of Plynth’s customers is an independent record label that sends out a monthly postcard newsletter. Using Plynth, a photo of the concert on the postcard can be scanned to show a video of the show while also unlocking limited edition content from artists.
“Each one of those are a similar use case of typically having a community and linking to content that you can really only get through the physical product and using it as a way to cut through the noise and make it feel a little bit more personal,” Matusky said.
Funding: Plynth has not yet raised any capital, but is considering doing so in the future.
The goal: Matusky wants Plynth to score more paying customers and daily active users, since many of the startup’s customers use Plynth’s services weekly or monthly, or even for singular projects. The firm will also add new features to provide more data and information on how people are using experiences created with Plynth.
“That's the big focus right now. We need to add more features that will really keep people using it and getting them using it regularly and getting value from it on a daily or weekly basis,” Matusky said.
