10-20-2009

Our Investment in Organic Motion

by Foundry

We are pleased to announce our investment in Organic Motion, Inc. The company is based in New York City and is a leading innovator of computer vision and advanced motion capture systems. Organic Motion’s core computer vision technology dramatically increases a computer’s ability to see and understand the motion of humans and other living organisms. The company offers groundbreaking turnkey and customized motion capture systems that utilize its patent-pending breakthrough computer vision technology.

This investment is part of our human computer interaction investment theme, along with previous investments Oblong and Smith and Tinker.

We got excited in Organic Motion after we saw their technology which allows computers to see objects without using the traditional approaches of body suits and or ball markers attached to the subject. The limitations of this approach are significant as tracking is crude because these systems are limited to a number of specific points and a large number of movements can’t be deciphered or tracked. Furthermore, the setup process is time-consuming and costly.

Organic Motion’s solution is the first commercial markerless motion capture system. The company created an advanced system which looks at people in a manner very similar to the way the brain processes human vision. Significantly, the Organic Motion system does this all using off-the-shelf and readily available low cost hardware.

The company already has customers in the retail, military and education markets and was founded by CEO Andrew Tschesnok. Along with President Jonathan Rand, we look forward to a long and rewarding partnership with the company.