Mixed-Reality Startup Xperiel Raises $7 Million to ‘Unify Physical and Digital World’

Xperiel has raised $7 million to build out its cloud-based “real world web” platform, a mixed-reality experience that lookings to “unify the physical and digital worlds.”

The venture capital hails from an impressive roster of investors, including Google board members, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Major League Baseball.

The Xperiel platform provides the tools for building and hosting the real-world web. It makes it possible to connect everything to the IoT, build cloud-based applications and deliver mixed reality experiences across any OS or connected device.

“Xperiel is breaking new ground by providing a highly abstracted language for building event-driven, device-agnostic applications as well as an IoT-centric connectivity fabric that ties together devices, events and content to enable customer engagement and commerce that is far more effective than other available solutions,” said Stephen Hendrick, principal analyst for application development and deployment research, ESG.

Based on the Xperiel founders’ Ph.D. research, the completely cloud-based and patented Xperiel pebbling language opens doors for non-technical people to build applications in days instead of months that can be iterated on the fly based on real-time user feedback and analytics. Applications developed with Xperiel are entirely cloud-based without sacrificing native performance. Xperiel connects any hardware or software—past, present or future—to the IoT by turning it into an interaction point that triggers Xperiel applications through existing sensors built into mobile phones, wearables, virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, etc.

“Opportunities include everything from promoting special offers to providing personalized greetings on our big screens to playing sponsored games and contests where they can win meetings with their favorite players,” said Tucker Kain, Los Angeles Dodgers CFO. “Xperiel is turning our park and everything in it into a giant physical-digital ecosystem, where every inch of real estate can become digitally interactive, connecting fans with experiences that drive higher engagement rates, monetization and fun.”

Xperiel calls this “experiential marketing at scale.”

“There are a lot of IoT platforms available on the market, and Xperiel is the only company that has figured out a way to take every piece of IoT technology and tie it together in an effective and mainstream way,” said Alex Hertel, CEO and cofounder, Xperiel. “With Xperiel providing an orchestration layer for the IoT we’ve opened up the door for an infinite amount of possible interactions between people, machines and devices, bringing to market the consumer-facing portion of IoT that we call the Real World Web.”

The Silicon Valley-based Xperiel was founded by Canadian brothers Alex and Philipp Hertel. They founded by Walleto, which was acquired by Google to become the basis of Google Wallet. Xperial was an offshoot of their Ph.D. research originally conducted at the University of Toronto in 2008 under the tutelage of Turing Award winner Stephen Cook.