Industrial virtual reality company PlayWerk takes work and play up a notch. The Irvine-based company expanded its product line with Reach Truck-Simulator. The new product—used indoors in high-rise warehouses—targets e-commerce players, retailers and third-party logistics. Its customer base is slightly different than Forklift-Simulator, which the company launched last year and is now used by more than 40 customers in 10 countries.
Irvine-based PlayWerk incorporates VR in gamified environments to help companies train their workforce.
The Forklift-Simulator, comprised of forklift parts and a VR goggle that produce a 3-D perspective of a real driving experience—with 10 different levels and 40 exercises—is used by brands such as Toyota, BMW and L’Oreal. The product also provides analytics on the driver.
Its Reach Truck-Simulator operates on a similar concept, consisting of reach-truck parts and a VR goggle.
The company raised $2.2 million in seed funding. K5 Ventures in Newport Beach led the round, raising $1.6 million in a convertible note, according to Ray Chan, managing director. Funding will support PlayWerk’s expansion of product lines.
“Companies are evermore concerned about standardizing safety processes over multiple locations and a variety of skill levels, VR and gamification can be incredibly successful tools to enable rapid skill building for workers and roll out a proactive safety culture to all locations concurrently,” said Amir Banifatemi, deal lead and co-founder of K5.
PlayWerk also expanded its management team with four appointments: Stijn Vanorbeek as chief executive and Ryan Breed as chief operating officer. Vanorbeek, along with Bram Clincke and Jelmen Lombaerts, founded the company. Lombaerts will lead the European division in Belgium.
Vanorbeek previously served as president of Ross Robotics, a global company that designs and manufactures product for live television production.
Clincke formerly led Groupon divisions in Europe and Asia and was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. in Singapore. Lombaerts, previously a firefighter, invented the VR forklift simulator.
Breed was previously a senior vice president at Gaikai, a Sony Interactive Entertainment company.
The company has 15 employees and doesn’t rule out hiring more talents. “We are always on the lookout for great talents. Especially full-stack, front-end developers and people with experience in gaming industry,” according to Clincke.
Radioactive
Medical use of radioactive material falls broadly into diagnostics and therapeutics. The latter entails using radioactive ingredients to treat cancer, and a team at the University of California-Irvine plans to harness growth in therapeutic nuclear medicine with its technology.
Startup Purist aims to provide radioactive ingredients to pharmaceutical companies that develop radioactive drugs to treat cancer using small-scale and localized nuclear reactors. Chemical engineering postdoctoral scholar Leila Safavi-Tehrani, who informally pitched last week at UCI Applied Innovation’s Monday Night Football event at the Cove, said it’s important to produce radioactive ingredients locally because of radioactive decay—the breakdown of a radioactive ingredient as it loses energy by emitting radiation.
“Radioactive ingredients decay differently, can range from seconds to weeks. For medical purposes their half-life is pretty short,” Safavi-Tehrani said.
The problem is the U.S. lacks proper production facilities.
It’s estimated that radioisotopes are used 35,000 times daily in the U.S. alone, according to the University of Missouri Research Reactor Center. The university, for the past 40 years, has produced the majority of radioisotopes for medical and academic needs.
There are few sites with a 10-megawatt facility operating 6 ½ days a week, 52 weeks a year to produce radioisotopes. Purist hopes to leverage its proprietary technology to help facilities with smaller radioactive reactors produce high-purity, medical-grade ingredients.
The company has been funded with federal grants and competition money, including two prizes totaling $25,000 from UCI’s 2017 New Venture competition in May.
Safavi-Tehrani said that she and founder Mikael Nilsson, associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science, aren’t actively seeking investor money but plans to advance its technology using nondilutive federal grants.
Memories
David Berkus remembers well the day he brought in Steve Streit to pitch his fledgling investor group, Tech Coast Angels. It was 1999 at the old Sutton Place Hotel on MacArthur Boulevard.
Berkus recounted the story in Irvine this month after moderating a panel at TCA’s 20th anniversary. Chairman Emeritus Berkus made 110 times his investment on Streit’s company, Green Dot Corp.
“They invented the industry,” Berkus said of the creators of the prepaid Visa and MasterCard. “And they’ve taken it beyond.”
Streit is still chief executive, and Green Dot stock is still going—about $63 a share, near its all-time high.
Like any angel—and Berkus has fairly been a career angel—he has been wrong more than right, but the rights have outweighed the wrongs.
What in Green Dot gave Berkus and fellow Angels the green light? Berkus’ biggest rule of angel investing: “Buy the entrepreneur before you buy the idea.”
—Pete Weitzner
