Daqri

» see daqri.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

daqri sold a $9,000 ar helmet to construction sites and oil rigs. i never wore one. nobody i knew in computer vision did either. it was an enterprise product sold field-by-field to industrial buyers, and it died about as quietly as it had launched.

the company was founded in 2010 in los angeles and raised $275 million across several rounds. the pitch was that it would be the industrial alternative to google glass. the bet was that ar would arrive on construction sites and oil platforms before it arrived in consumer pockets. the smart helmet was a hard hat with a transparent visor that overlaid 3d instructions and thermal-imaging data on the worker's field of view. impressive in demos. expensive in practice. the smart glasses follow-up in 2017 was lighter but had the same problem. nobody had budget for a $9k device per worker.

by mid-2019 the round had dried up. on september 9 daqri announced an asset sale and laid off most of its 140 employees. the patents were picked up at auction. the company's name does not appear in industrial ar coverage anymore. magic leap inherited most of the surviving attention. neither survived the actual moment of consumer ar that everyone was waiting for.

~ the dossier ~

~ the field-deployment problem ~

industrial ar pitches a real problem. construction inspectors and oil-rig engineers do need overlay information when their hands are full and they are wearing a hard hat. the gap between needing it and paying $9,000 per worker for it is enormous. daqri's customers were almost all proof-of-concept buyers running a small pilot inside a larger firm. nobody graduated those pilots into fleet deployments. the unit economics never worked. by 2018 the company was producing more press releases than sales.

~ what really happened ~

daqri's collapse looked like a normal silicon-beach implosion from the outside. the ceo had already left in 2017. by mid-2019 the ar funding climate had cooled. on september 9 2019 the wire-service announcement landed as a one-line "company is selling assets" piece. no chapter 11 filing and no last-stand pivot. customers who had bought $9,000 helmets got no orderly wind-down memo. the helmets in the field were on their own from that day forward, with no firmware updates and no support contract anyone would honor.

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