Property entrepreneur Nick Candy’s venture capital firm has bought augmented reality start-up Blippar.com out of administration.
Candy Ventures said it has acquired the intellectual property assets and various brands, as well as the trade name Blippar.
This will be ‘deployed into a new business’ with ‘a number of former key Blippar team members’, with a plan to offer software that easily allows people to create augmented reality, which mixes digital and real life.
Candy was a major investor in Blippar, which was forced into administration last month after a shareholder dispute.
Former boss Ambarish Mitra, who co-founded the firm in 2011, will be CEO of the new company and the deal also includes the acquisition of another Blippar-owned augmented reality service Layar.
Candy is married to pop star Holly Valance and made his name with high profile developments in the London property market, including One Hyde Park. In recent years he has branched out into backing technology start-ups and other businesses.
A spokesperson for Candy Ventures said: ‘The augmented reality market is growing exponentially and Blippar was an early innovator and leader in this space.
‘Rish and the team built a great business which had to adapt to the challenges of a constantly-evolving industry. With the right application of its powerful AR technology, there is huge potential for the new company to drive innovation in AR and position itself at the forefront of the industry.’
Augmented reality involves blending digital elements into real-life scenarios and Blippar has worked on this with brands including Disney, Nestle, Kellogg’s, Pepsi, Madam Tussauds and Cadburys.
A 2016 series D funding round valued Blippar at more than $500million, while reports last year claimed it had become a ‘unicorn’ an unlisted start-up with a valuation of more than $1billion.
However, as with many tech start-ups, monetising Blippar has proved tough and the company needed to keep money flowing in. Blippar went into administration in December 2018 in an alleged row between a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and fellow investors over funding.
As the Candy buyout was revealed, Mitra claimed Blippar has ‘a huge opportunity to create the best platform to allow our customers to seamlessly build and publish successful AR experiences in the same way that WordPress allowed anyone to easily create and publish a website’.
