Portland entrepreneur Michael Hoffman is getting the band back together, so to speak, with a new venture aimed at helping more companies embrace the emerging world of spatial computing.
The new business is called IQXR. Hoffman is CEO, and he is building it alongside Chief Technology Officer Michael House and Chief Product Officer Ally Kaiser. All three are Portland-based and all worked together at the startup Object Theory and more recently at Microsoft.
The team is working in what is known as extended reality (XR), which covers augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. IQXR is building a platform that can be used by customers to create immersive tools to meet their specific business needs.
IQXR is starting up inside an existing business. It is one of six companies under the parent company Mesmerise Group. The larger Mesmerise Group was started in 2016 and has different businesses focused on emerging areas like immersive technology, sustainability and artificial intelligence. The larger company has about 200 employees across the U.K and the U.S.
“IQXR we are focused on a spatial computing platform,” said Hoffman. “We have a data science team and an AI team, and this group gives us all these disciplines under one roof. We can look at the intersection of AI and spatial computing and unlock the capabilities there.”
As part of Mesmerise the three IQXR execs also have titles within the larger group: Hoffman is also head of platforms, House is director of engineering and Kaiser is director of product.
"We're very excited to welcome our new hires to the Mesmerise Group team. Their combined decades of industry expertise will be invaluable to our continued growth," said Daglar Cizmeci, Group CEO and co-founder of Mesmerise in a written statement. "The reality is there's still a wealth of untapped possibility in the XR industry. I'm confident that Hoffman, House and Kaiser's deep-rooted knowledge will be key in unlocking XR's true potential in the enterprise, providing our customers with top-quality solutions."
Hoffman started talking to Mesmerise in January. He sees the organization as the right place to not only build the team needed but also the software tools needed to drive mass adoption of XR within client companies. Mesmerise works with Fortune 500 companies.
The other critical missing piece until now for broad use of AR or VR has been the hardware. There have been fits and starts around devices like Meta’s Quest, Microsoft’s HoloLens and Google Glass. But Hoffman sees the recently announced Apple Vision Pro as the key missing piece.
“I believe there is a viable device now. Meta Quest is great. But, Apple, just being Apple, and the way they execute, the Apple Vision Pro is transformative,” said Hoffman, who is excited as ever about the potential for this technology. “I have never felt more personally empowered to solve the challenges that keep this industry from opening up.”
From working on the HoloLens to his work building Object Theory, Hoffman said the challenges he faced at those places inform how to build the platform IQXR is developing.
“(We are) in a position to make a big difference in the adoption of spatial computing,” he said, adding that in addition to the team he is building, IQXR will be able to tap into the AI and other expertise at other Mesmerise companies.
Hoffman likened the platform that IQXR will build to Legos. The IQXR team will build the different blocks that can then be used by customers in different configurations based on their needs. The goal is to create an entire ecosystem that addresses needs like end-to-end encryption, low latency or working offline or on-premises that can be used to “build a whole metaverse from our stuff alone.”
The IQXR team is eight people full time plus some contractors. Hoffman is hiring and expects to be about 15 by the end of the year. The company is distributed right now but as it gets bigger Hoffman expects to open an office.
