Mawari Raises $6.5 Million For Dual Compute Network

Mawari, the Los Altos based cloud rendering startup we wrote about in Forbes fourteen months ago, has taken in a seed round of $6.5 M co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Decasonic. Mawari has an XR-delivery solution for low-latency real-time XR cloud streaming for delivery to 5G mobile devices. For years the industry has been calling this “the AR Cloud,” something without which the world cannot be painted with data. This is the problem that led founders Luis Oscar Ramirez Solorzano, CEO and Aleksandr Borisov CTO in 2018 to focus on breaking this bottleneck.

When we last left Mawari in December, 2021, they had just successfully enabled an interactive, photorealistic 5G digital-human guide for smartphones that had been developed by Japanese telecom KDDI. At the time, the company was in stealth mode and funding its operations through fees, so was not raising outside capital. In 2022, Mawari graduated from the T-Mobile accelerator and integrated its streaming technology with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces.

“Simply put, the promise of XR will not be realized until XR content can be delivered instantly to mobile devices at scale, with consumer-grade visual quality. The Mawari Network overcomes the bottlenecks that limit scalability and mainstream adoption of XR and Metaverse applications,” says Ramirez Solorzano. "There is no infrastructure today that can enable this,” said CTO Borisov.

As Mawari worked through the problems of implementing and scaling its split-rending technology with their clients, the founders conceived of a Web3 approach. Providers of XR content pay the Network, and Mawari Network delivery partners each receive a share of that revenue.

“Mawari makes money both from the use of its CODEC and its management of the Mawari Network." said Aleksandr Borisov, Co-Founder & CTO of Mawari. “We believe our technology and decentralized approach is a major breakthrough and allows devices to operate without perceived latency, rendering scenes in real time. Split rendering will be how immersive content will be delivered."

“Throughout the T-Mobile Accelerator Program, the implementation of Mawari Network’s XR Streaming Software Development Kit (SDK) moved the heavy rendering burden from the device to T-Mobile’s edge servers without a perceivable delay for the end user,” said John Saw, Executive Vice President, Advanced & Emerging Technologies, T-Mobile, in a statement. “By taking the burden of processing and rendering away from the device and moving it into the cloud, we can eliminate the need for bulky headsets while untethering the glasses from your smartphone in the future. This is an incredible achievement and a true testament to the power of 5G and the role it will play in the future of XR.”

“What Mawari is building isn't just better. It's also faster. And cheaper.” said Ken Seiff, Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures. “We were initially drawn to the Mawari team by their vision for leveraging decentralized compute with all the implications for spreading the technology broadly and making it more accessible to a much larger market.”

“In the next 24 months, Mawari will launch the Mawari TestNet in collaboration with an initial group of distribution partners in order to deliver activations in 3 different geographic regions with 3 different use cases.”, explains Mawari’s COO Fred Speckeen. “The collaboration in each region will be with “local” storage and rendering providers (GPU farms) who will provide the 5G delivery for the last mile to mobile devices.” Candidate experiences currently under consideration are: Engineering education, Medical education, sports, entertainment, and real-estate visualization.

Mawari says it has dozens of customers and partners including 8th Wall, BMW, Ericsson, KDDI, Immersal, Niantic, Qualcomm, Sapporo Breweries and T-Mobile. Blockchange Ventures and Decasonic led the round, with additional investments from Abies Ventures, Accord Ventures, Anfield, Outlier Ventures, Primal Capital, and angels