Innovation Origins

Fectar makes virtual world accessible to any business

There is almost no product left in this world that is not designed in 3D. These 3D files are sent to the factory and that's the end of it. While they could actually last the entire life cycle of a product. These designs can also be used in other ways, believes Eugène Kuipers, co-founder of the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) content management system Fectar. For an online shopping experience, or to train new staff, for example. He hopes companies will become increasingly aware of this. Indeed, that seems to be happening. In this episode of start-up-of-the-day, he talks about his fast-growing platform, scammers from Dubai and the possibilities of VR and AR for businesses.

What is Fectar?

"Fectar is a content management system for VR and AR. You could say it's the WordPress of AR and VR. Without programming, you can create your own interactive 3D presentations. Fectar consists of two parts: the studio that lets you build something and the app that lets you view everything. The Fectar apps are available for cell phones as well as VR and AR glasses. We also have AR View, which is a white-label plugin. So if you have an existing app and you want to apply AR, you can do that too. It actually works the same as it used to with Flash. You have to install it once and then you never see it again. We now have a few hundred customers and over six million downloads worldwide."

How did you guys come up with the idea?

"I have been doing AR since 2011. Before that, I had an e-learning company with online courses. I still find that the Internet has no experience. You can upgrade it with colors and movies, but it's still just a flat screen. AR is really different. I saw in 2018 that the technology was only really ready to be deployed on this scale. Together with co-founder Rens Lensvelt, I was then working on the Hololens, an AR glasses from Microsoft. A lot of companies were buying such expensive glasses. If you came back there a year later, they were only running Microsoft demos. Developing something yourself just turned out to be difficult.

Then we got the idea to create a content management system for those AR glasses. Rens (co-founder Fectar) then said that maybe it could also run on the smartphone, if we took a different approach. A week later, he came up with Fectar's first proof-of-concept. We then gained a lot of experience at trade shows and conferences, but people turned out not to be quite ready for VR and AR. We then started further development with a team of five. Eventually, we launched the platform in early 2020."

You guys grew very quickly in two years after that. How did that happen?

During the first Corona lockdown in April 2020, I made a video with Fectar of a yellow 3D McLaren car, which I had placed on my street at home in 3D. I posted that movie on Instagram. We scored 20,000 installs of the app in 48 hours. That was incredible. It happened not only on Instagram, but also on other social media with topics other than cars. Now our users are all over the world in more than 200 countries. We have almost one million downloads of the app in India and even a user base in Ghana.

We focus on three markets: education, industry and retail. The biggest change worldwide is going to be in the latter market. We're still kind of in the period now where people put a car in their room for fun, for example. But a year from now, you'll put a refrigerator in your home just to check it out, before then buying it online. Meanwhile, people expect companies to adopt AR and VR more and more, because they themselves are familiar with the technology. We are also now working on a project to train children in Ukraine to recognize unexploded military ordnance. So we are also really doing something that has a social impact."

Was it difficult to get investments?

"Yes, outright yes. In the Netherlands you have many parties who say they are investors, but actually they are bankers or financiers. Only if you can show that you already have a profitable business are they lining up for you. That's not investing, it's financing. That's just not how it works with start-ups and scale-ups. That really disappointed me in the Netherlands. I financed the start-up myself. When so many users came on board, more investors got on board. We are now working on the next growth phase.

I have also been in contact with some major American parties for investment. At that time, however, we were already negotiating with a party from Dubai for a $10 million investment. In the end it turned out to be a scam. That was quite a shock.

Fortunately, we caught on just in time. Unfortunately, by now those American investors had already left. Because when an American company approaches you, you have to bite right away and not wait weeks. Then they simply don't answer the phone anymore. Nevertheless, Fectar continued to grow and we eventually got new investors fairly quickly."

What makes your product better than what is already on the market?

"Our reference devices are the iPhone 6s and the Samsung S7: everything we build has to work at least on these devices. So we have a large potential user base of 2.4 billion smartphones worldwide. That also makes our platform "any place, any time, on any device. You can also collaborate with multiple users, both in AR and VR. You then just see each other's avatar floating around in the 3D environment in the Fectar app on your mobile and you can talk to each other and point things out. That ability to collaborate in VR and AR offers no one else at all."

What is the ultimate goal?

"We want to go on to fifty million users. Only then do you really matter. We also have user-activity tracking that is not traceable to the individual, but it does capture how people move in the new AR scenes. For example, we can see walking routes and how often and how long users look at something.

In the next five to 10 years, a lot is going to change, because we have new interfaces where we can communicate in a different way. We just don't know yet what the best way is. We hope our data is going to help with that as well. I expect that in three years virtual reality will have a clear place in online shopping. That's our goal. You dream of being able to grow so fast with a start-up, but if you had told me beforehand that it would go so fast, I probably would have thought you were naive. It's really special to experience."