Brian Mullins

Brian Mullins is an engineer and technology executive who founded the augmented reality company DAQRI in 2010 and led it as chief executive officer until October 2017. Under his leadership DAQRI developed the DAQRI Smart Helmet, a hard hat with a built-in AR display for industrial workers. According to later reporting, total investment in the company over its lifetime reached the US$300 million range. On 16 November 2016 he testified at "Exploring Augmented Reality," a hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on the technology. In 2019 he became chief executive of Mind Foundry, an artificial intelligence company that originated at the University of Oxford.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Career facts, dates, figures and quotes checked against each cited source, including the 2016 Senate hearing transcript; identity matched to the DAQRI founder in existing wiki links. About review dates.

Early life and education

Mullins holds a Bachelor of Science from the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, where he studied electrical and mechanical engineering. He graduated in 1997. At the 2016 Senate hearing, Senator Roger Wicker, a member of the academy's board, asked him about his time there; Mullins said that the broad applicability of engineering across the Merchant Marine had helped shape how he conceptualized AR in the workforce, and called his semester at sea "one of the best experiences of my life."

Career

Government work and industrial robotics

After graduating, Mullins worked as an engineer at the Computer-Aided Operational Research Facility, operated by the U.S. Department of Transportation, supporting simulation and network technologies. He then spent three years as a consultant to the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego, working on military command and control systems. In his written Senate testimony he said that at both organizations he "worked with simulation and early mixed reality technologies that provided a glimpse of what AR would one day become." The Augmented World Expo's XR Hall of Fame entry for Mullins says that during this period he developed systems using some of the earliest vision-based mixed reality technologies. He later moved into industrial automation and robotics. He told the Senate committee that the move showed him how technology could raise workplace efficiency, but that he "was dismayed to see workers left behind as factory floors were transformed," and that this led him to see AR as a way to keep people "an invaluable part of the loop."

DAQRI

Mullins founded DAQRI in Los Angeles in 2010. The Senate committee's chairman introduced him in 2016 as the company's co-founder and chief executive. DAQRI began as a mobile AR company whose smartphone experiences were triggered by QR codes and real-world objects. According to a 2020 investigation by Janko Roettgers, first published by Protocol, the company was valued at US$5 million in an asset transfer in May 2013. The private equity firm Tarsadia Investments then bought out the company instead of taking a minority stake, and Tarsadia had put in a reported US$275 million by 2017, with total funding in the US$300 million range. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported that DAQRI had raised more than US$275 million since Mullins founded it.

In 2014 DAQRI announced a hard hat with integrated AR glasses, which became the DAQRI Smart Helmet. In a 2015 interview with NBC News, Mullins presented the helmet as a safety device: "If I'm in a boiler room that's too hot for me, it will alert me when I'm in there for too long." He said its battery lasted an entire shift of eight to 12 hours and that DAQRI's clients employed as many as 100,000 engineers in the field. NBC reported a price of about US$10,000. Mullins also said Google Glass had not been a failure because it "raised awareness about augmented reality," but NBC reported his view that Glass had tried to do too much, too soon, at a price of US$1,500. Roettgers later put the helmet's cost at US$15,000. The expo listed Mullins among the keynote speakers for AWE 2015. The expo's archived website also carries his profile as one of its awards judges.

At CES 2016 Mullins announced a new version of the Smart Helmet built around a sixth-generation Intel Core m7 processor and Intel RealSense depth sensing. DAQRI said the update gave five times the processing power of earlier versions, and the helmet carried a 360-degree industrial sensor array with HD video and thermal vision sensors. "With the addition of Intel technology, we are supercharging DAQRI Smart Helmet so that we can continue to drive the future of work," Mullins said. In March 2016 DAQRI said it had acquired 1066 Labs, a maker of see-through components for head-mounted displays with offices in Hastings, England and Redmond, Washington. Mullins called its team "world class when it comes to innovations in head-mounted display hardware."

Senate testimony

At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on 16 November 2016, Mullins appeared alongside John Hanke of Niantic, Brian Blau of Gartner, Stanley Pierre-Louis of the Entertainment Software Association and Ryan Calo of the University of Washington. His testimony focused on AR in industry. He said companies including General Electric, Boeing, Intel and Huntington Ingalls were using AR for training, maintenance, construction, defense and manufacturing, and he cited a Boeing and Iowa State University study comparing AR work instructions with desktop instructions for aircraft wingtip assembly. He also described automotive head-up displays as the start of consumer AR and said DAQRI's AR technology was already in "hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road today." VentureBeat later reported that DAQRI's head-up display technology was used in more than 150,000 vehicles. Mullins asked the committee to recognize that consumer uses of AR would differ materially from industrial ones, and that "regulations need to be tailored instead of painted with a broad brush." A November 2017 UCLA IS Associates announcement stated that in 2016 he was also invited to speak at the White House.

Departure from DAQRI

On 10 October 2017 DAQRI announced that Mullins had stepped down as chief executive. Roy Ashok, the company's chief product officer since November 2015 and a former director of product management at Qualcomm Vuforia, replaced him. Mullins stayed on as an adviser and board member and called his time as CEO "the greatest privilege of my professional life." At the time DAQRI was preparing to ship its DAQRI Smart Glasses in late October 2017. Board chairman Greg Casserly told the Los Angeles Business Journal that the company was "entering phase two of the company's growth, which will be characterized by product shipments at scale." Roettgers's 2020 account of the company said that Mullins was "forced to leave" when Ashok took over, and that at about the same time DAQRI shifted from the helmet to simpler AR glasses that retailed for US$5,000.

In November 2017 he received the Start-Up/Entrepreneurial Award at the UCLA IS Associates Executive Leadership Award Dinner, where he was described as DAQRI's founder and adviser. In a TEDx talk reported by Next Reality in January 2018, Mullins argued that AR could spread specialist knowledge more widely, drawing on his family's experience of finding a surgery for his son that their first doctor had not known about. "Could augmented reality make the best surgeon better? I would say: yes," he said.

DAQRI shut down operations and let go its final staff in September 2019. Snap then acquired some of its assets and staff; Roettgers noted that the timing matched a US$34 million acquisition disclosed in Snap's annual report.

Mind Foundry

Mullins joined Mind Foundry, an Oxford University company founded by professors Stephen Roberts and Michael Osborne, as chief executive in 2019. The company's leadership page during his tenure credited him with leading more than 350 employees across four countries and raising more than US$330 million in investment capital in his previous CEO roles. It also said he had been awarded more than 100 U.S. patents and had received an Edison Award for industrial design. He was still described as Mind Foundry's CEO in January 2025, when the company focused on AI for defence and insurance. As of September 2026, Mind Foundry's leadership page names Lindsay Chadwick as chief executive and no longer lists Mullins.

Recognition

Mullins is listed in the XR Hall of Fame maintained by the Augmented World Expo as "DAQRI Founder - One of the First AR for Enterprise Solutions." The entry credits DAQRI with the first industrial-focused AR system integrated into a hard hat.