DAQRI

DAQRI
Information
Type	Private company
Industry	Augmented reality, Enterprise hardware and software
Founded	2010
Founder	Brian Mullins, Gaia Dempsey, Philip Tolk
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Brian Mullins (co-founder, CEO until 2017), Roy Ashok (CEO from 2017)
Products	DAQRI Smart Helmet, DAQRI Smart Glasses, Worksense
Website	https://daqri.com (defunct)

DAQRI was an American Augmented reality company founded in 2010 and based in Los Angeles, California. It built head-worn AR hardware and software aimed at industrial customers, and its best-known products were the DAQRI Smart Helmet, an AR-equipped hard hat, and the later DAQRI Smart Glasses. The company was one of the more heavily funded Enterprise AR startups of the 2010s, raising a reported 275 million US dollars, most of it from the private-equity firm Tarsadia Investments.

DAQRI announced in September 2019 that it was winding down and pursuing an asset sale, shutting down its cloud services and smart-glasses hardware platforms by the end of that month. Much of what remained, including roughly two dozen employees and certain assets, was acquired by Snap in late 2019; the company's patent portfolio was later sold separately.

History

Founding and early consumer AR

DAQRI was founded in 2010 by Brian Mullins, Gaia Dempsey, and Philip Tolk. The company entered the market in February 2011 with an augmented reality publishing platform that overlaid an image or video on a smartphone's camera view after the phone scanned a QR code. Its early work included consumer-facing AR experiences before the company shifted its focus toward enterprise and industrial uses.

In June 2013 DAQRI raised a 15 million US dollar Series A round led by Tarsadia Investments, at a reported valuation of about 5 million US dollars. Tarsadia continued to fund the company over the following years, and by mid-2017 total financing was reported at 275 million US dollars.

Smart Helmet

DAQRI's first head-worn product was the DAQRI Smart Helmet, an Android-powered industrial hard hat designed for construction, manufacturing, and field-service work. Development began around 2014, and the device was shown at CES 2016. The helmet integrated a sixth-generation Intel Core m7 processor with an array of cameras and sensors, including thermal imaging, and presented AR information such as instructions and equipment data overlaid on the wearer's view. The Smart Helmet was a bulky and expensive device, priced at roughly 15,000 US dollars, and it required industrial safety certifications that limited large-scale deployment.

In March 2016 DAQRI bought 1066 Labs, a head-mounted display manufacturer, to bring helmet production capability in house.

Smart Glasses

DAQRI followed the helmet with the DAQRI Smart Glasses, a lighter form factor for office, engineering, and less rugged industrial environments. The glasses began shipping to professional customers on November 8, 2017, at a price of 4,995 US dollars. They used a tethered design in which a lightweight headset connected to a separate body-worn compute pack containing a sixth-generation Intel Core m7 processor and an Intel RealSense LR200 depth sensor for tracking. The optical see-through display provided a 44-degree field of view, wider than the Microsoft HoloLens of the same period, and the headset weighed about 14 ounces. At 4,995 US dollars the Smart Glasses were positioned against the HoloLens Commercial Suite, which carried a similar price.

On March 7, 2018, DAQRI announced Worksense, a suite of AR productivity applications for the Smart Glasses covering tasks such as guided instructions, remote assistance, and annotation.

Leadership change

On October 10, 2017, co-founder and chief executive Brian Mullins stepped down. He was replaced by chief product officer Roy Ashok, a former Qualcomm executive. Co-founder Gaia Dempsey publicly announced in December 2017 that she was also leaving the company.

Acquisitions and the Envisics spin-off

DAQRI expanded by acquiring several smaller companies. It bought the open-source AR software maker ARToolworks and the EEG-headband startup Melon in 2015, followed by the display manufacturer 1066 Labs and the British holographic-display developer Two Trees Photonics in March 2016. The Two Trees team, which was developing holographic head-up displays for car windshields, was later spun out as a separate company, Envisics, in 2018.

Wind-down and asset sale

By 2019 funding for AR hardware startups had cooled, and a planned financing deal fell through. In September 2019 DAQRI told staff by email that it was pursuing an asset sale that would end its industrial wearables business and begin winding down the company, and that its cloud and smart-glasses hardware platforms would be retired by September 30, 2019. The company closed its roughly 18,000-square-foot Los Angeles office and laid off its remaining staff.

Snap, the parent of Snapchat, acquired certain DAQRI assets and about two dozen employees in late 2019, several of whom moved to a Snap office in Vienna, Austria, led by former DAQRI chief technology officer Daniel Wagner. Snap's annual report disclosed a 34 million US dollar acquisition consistent with the timing, though the parties did not formally confirm a purchase price. DAQRI's augmented reality patent portfolio, covering elements from holographic optics to developer software, was offered for sale or license separately; more than a hundred of its patents and applications were later reported to have been acquired by Facebook through an intermediary.

Reception and legacy

DAQRI was frequently cited alongside Magic Leap and Meta as one of the well-funded AR startups of the 2010s that struggled to turn large investments into a sustainable business. Former employees and reporting attributed its collapse to heavy spending, a lack of product direction, and the difficulty of building expensive head-worn hardware for industrial use cases that were still emerging. Reviewers noted that the Smart Helmet's thermal imaging was genuinely useful for field work, but that the overall AR experience and the high prices limited adoption against competing devices such as the Microsoft HoloLens, Epson Moverio, and Vuzix enterprise glasses.