Advanced Reality Secures $1.8 Million in First Round of Private Financing.

Business/Technology Editors

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 22, 2002

Start-Up Developer of Real-Time Peer-to-Peer Collaboration Platform 

Ramps Up Product Development, Customer Support, Sales and Marketing

Advanced Reality, Inc., the company that makes applications collaborative, today announced that it has raised $1.8 million from private investors in a first round of financing. The company will use these funds to grow its product development and customer support resources, as well as accelerate sales and marketing activities for Presence-AR, a peer-to-peer collaboration platform that embeds secure real-time collaboration capabilities directly into existing and new applications. The round was led by Advanced Reality executives and a group of prominent Houston-based angel investors. Advanced Reality recently signed its first customer, chemical giant Rohm Haas. The company formally introduced Presence-AR on Dec. 10, 2001 (see http://www.advancedreality.com/news_and_events/press_releases).

"The increasing pressure to streamline business processes and shorten product development cycles is creating significant market opportunities for vendors of collaboration software," said Thomas Bernhardt, senior vice president and chief technology officer of NetIQ, co-founder of Mission Critical Software, Ernst and Young 2001 Entrepreneur of the Year for South Texas, and an Advanced Reality investor. "By enabling enterprises and commercial software vendors to add collaborative functionality to any application without modifying or rewriting its source code, Advanced Reality is positioned to become a major player in the collaboration software market."

Presence-AR is a peer-to-peer platform that provides a complete and secure collaborative infrastructure for any application regardless of its operating system or hardware platform. This unique capability increases end-users' productivity by allowing them to collaborate on documents and data using applications they are already familiar with, rather than having to learn and work in a separate collaboration system or workspace.

"Collaboration capabilities will achieve their true potential when they are embedded directly into applications, as opposed to residing in a separate program or infrastructure, a concept we call contextual collaboration," said Matthew Cain, vice president of industry leading research firm META Group. "To achieve contextual collaboration, technologies are required that enable users to instantly collaborate from within programs they are already familiar with and use everyday."

Market Opportunity Spans Software, Hardware, and Wireless Platforms

Using a patent-pending technology that makes the data itself collaborative, Presence-AR allows users to collaborate on the same data using different applications and access devices including PCs, handhelds, and mobile phones. For example, users in different operating companies of a multinational corporation could collaborate on a financial spreadsheet using Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and a custom developed financial application. Presence-AR uses a fast and easy-to-develop application specific adapter to provide all the necessary infrastructure elements required to make any application or group of applications collaborative.

"The ability to enable collaboration within and between enterprises will dramatically enhance many software applications. Our ability to embed real-time collaboration capabilities inside applications that companies have spent millions to deploy and train end-users to operate creates a huge market opportunity for us," said Linda Spain, CEO, Advanced Reality. "This round of financing provides the resources we need to accelerate product development, customer support, marketing, and sales initiatives required to meet the demand we are seeing in the market place."

Business Model

Presence-AR is available immediately from Advanced Reality. The company's target customers are enterprises, service providers, commercial software vendors, systems integrators, and Value Added Resellers (VARs) that want to make existing and new applications collaborative. Pricing is based on application requirements and size. Initially, integration services for enterprise customers will be provided Advanced Reality and its business partners. Later this year, a Software Developers Kit (SDK) will be available that allows enterprise developers to write their own Presence-AR adaptors.

Company Background

Founded in October 2000, Advanced Reality, Inc. develops software that makes existing and new applications collaborative without the need for complex programming or expensive infrastructure. The company's flagship product, Presence-AR, enables real-time collaboration across any computing platform, operating system, application, and access device. Advanced Reality customers are enterprises, service providers, commercial software vendors and systems integrators that want to make existing, and new, applications collaborative. Advanced Reality is privately held and headquartered in Houston, Texas. To contact Advanced Reality, call 713/526-4860, visit us on the Web at http://www.advancedreality.com/, or write to [e-mail].