On the heels of formally announcing betaworks ventures, the startup shop is today introducing its third ‘camp’.
betaworks Visioncamp is the latest accelerator-style program out of betaworks, and will focus on ‘camera-first’ applications and services, including augmented reality and computer vision.
The program will include mentorship from the leadership at betaworks (John Borthwick, Matt Hartman, Peter Rojas, Patrick Montague), as well as curriculum from external mentors. For example, Visioncamp will be co-hosted by Giphy, who is very much in the business of visual interfaces.
The program will start in January 2018, and will last for 11 weeks.
Applications open on Sept. 6 to startups that have a working beta and who are in the early stages of development. Visioncamp will accept six to ten companies into the program. Participating companies will receive $200K in pre-seed investment.
“Visioncamp will explore emerging ways to augment and enhance how we view and understand our surroundings,” said Patrick Montague. “New products in this category leverage smartphone cameras and sensors, as well as AR headsets. They employ computer vision techniques and take advantage of an explosion of available visual data. They create stickers, filters, overlays, and more immersive ‘mixed’ realities, experiences only now possible with cameras that understand what they see.”
Prior to Visioncamp, betaworks ran two other accelerator programs (Botcamp and Voicecamp), with graduates such as Shine, SpokenLayer, and StatsBot.
These camps are part of a three-pronged approach, including betaworks ventures (which makes pre-seed and seed investments) and betaworks studio (which builds companies within the startup shop through an EIR program).