Sep 28, 2017

Today we’re excited to announce a $4MM Series A round investment led by Tim Chang, partner at Mayfield. Tim is a proven investor & champion of VR , who has partnered with the founders of ngMoco (acquired be DeNA), Playdom (acquired by Disney), Basis (acquired by Intel), and Moat (acquired by Oracle). This will allow our team at TRIPP to begin creating transformative experiences that are digitally delivered. With over 15 years of experience in gaming and mobile, we are thrilled to embark on this new journey to create our first native VR product that is focused on changing the way a person feels to help them to live more happily and effectively. Over the past two decades, there has been a tremendous amount of research on the effects of digital and interactive experiences on the brain. We engage in different activities because of the way they make us feel. We listen to music, play video games, browse Pinterest, binge on our favorite shows, and our mental state is altered accordingly. But in many cases, we don’t have much control over the impact our daily digital interactions have on our mood. We can elect to engage in certain digital activities for specific purposes, but we’re also required to use various tools that have been proven to slow us down, make it harder for us to connect with other people, make us anxious and impact our sleep patterns. In order to de-stress, many people turn to guided meditation. In a typical guided meditation, someone directs you to focus on certain things, regulate your breathing, describe a scene, etc. At TRIPP, we’re developing a new way to create a state of mindfulness that isn’t just guided but happens “around” you. We are combining multiple elements to create a completely immersive, supercharged experience that is crafted to put users in a different headspace. Using visuals, sounds and targeted interactivity to first create a state of calm, we then take you on a journey that can stimulate a number of different feelings and moods — enabling users to take a step back from their busy lives and enjoy a sensory experience unlike any other. My partner and co-founder Zachary “Zack” Norman, our CTO Andreja Djokovic, and I have spent almost 20 years (together and individually) building one hardware-bending application after another across many platforms. And even though the VR market is still very small, we are excited to take full advantage of the deep immersion of VR. We want to create something that doesn’t exist on other platforms – a truly native application designed uniquely to the platform. Despite the amount of time spent innovating in VR, the applications built for it have mostly attempted to recreate this reality or more immersive 360 versions of content originally created for another medium. We are focused on using VR for stimulation rather than simulation. Taking a TRIPP will not be like anything that exists in the real world. However, TRIPP is first and foremost focused on delivering the benefits of its service and VR will be the first method of delivery of the TRIPP experience. We see a future where immersion will be an aspect of new mixed reality platforms and devices to come. As we did in the early stages of mobile content development, our plan is to make sure TRIPP is on every meaningful device that has deep immersion capabilities. We wish to thank our friends and family for their early support in helping us craft our vision. We would not have gotten to this point without their support. Today, we are extremely grateful to Tim Chang and the Mayfield team for believing in us and their passion for joining us on this TRIPP. Onward,