Squint Raises $6M in Funding from Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures to Expand AR-Powered Technology Platform

The Squint Platform Is Used by Large Global Customers including Siemens and The Volvo Group

Squint, the technology platform that uses augmented reality (AR) to optimize factory procedures and empower operators, announced $6 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding from Arc, Sequoia Capital’s pre-seed and seed-stage catalyst, and Menlo Ventures’ venture studio Menlo Labs, along with several angel investors.

Squint uses AR to power an intuitive mobile platform for factory operators who need dynamic, contextual help mapped to the world around them. The Squint platform brings the shop floor binder – full of instructions – to life, providing operators with an interactive experience that is both engaging and effective, while increasing learning speed and knowledge retention. With these capabilities, Squint enables organizations to digitize standard operating procedures using just a mobile phone, with no hassle — not even an IT team – making everyday tasks like training, operation, and maintenance faster and safer.

The flexibility of the Squint platform is a selling point for customers. Squint offers the only AR solution that is truly “open world,” meaning that content can be created anywhere, on the spot, without needing a QR code or a 3D model to detect objects and orient itself. Implementation with Squint is simple and self-serve, offering the fastest time-to-value in the manufacturing technology sector.

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Squint’s roster of customers, including global brands like Siemens and The Volvo Group, speaks to the value of their solution. Early customers report an 86% decrease in training time for new operators. Rachel Wood, the Learning & Development Site Lead at Siemens Spartanburg, explains, “We see Squint completely transforming our training process on the factory floor. It enables our workforce to learn with immersive spatial guides that boost productivity and, most importantly, encourage safety.”

Squint was founded in 2021 by CEO Devin Bhushan, who led AR products at Splunk and built mobile apps at Yahoo Sports and Flurry. “I first met Devin at Yahoo, and we also worked together at Splunk; he’s always stood out as an exceptional engineer with a great eye for design,” said Tim Tully, Menlo Ventures partner and Squint board member. “At Splunk, Devin led the development of our AR products. The number one request from customers was to bring more of their existing data and operational insights into AR. This led to the spark of an incredible business idea, so I was excited to bring Devin into our startup studio, Menlo Labs, to help put Squint on a path to success.” It was within Menlo Labs that the vision for Squint was validated, and manufacturing emerged as the first application for the platform.

“What drew us to Squint was the combination of an outlier founder in Devin, whose background makes him a leading expert in enterprise AR, and a compelling value proposition that is clearly resonating with large enterprise customers like Siemens, Volvo, and more,” said Jess Lee, partner at Sequoia. “Squint uses mobile AR, computer vision, and machine learning to replace paper binders, sticky notes, and human trainings. The way it optimizes factory procedures is incredibly powerful and has the potential to increase factory operations, transforming the way workers interact with machines and applications even beyond the factory floor.”

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