Oculis Labs is now entering our third year in operation. It's been a good ride so far, and no-one wants to get off. In fact, we have more people jumping on. I should explain.
When I started the company in 2007 it was just me, some ideas, and the initial investment. I got to work prototyping the ideas, developing patents and making connections with partners and customers.
In 2008 we started getting attention from potential customers and press, but we were still in the development phase as we were trying to get the first product, Chameleon, working and stable. We had 4 engineers and other staff working at that point. Getting Chameleon working was a major effort - no-one had ever tried to combine gazetracking, with vision/cognition research, and Windows OS to make a radical new security application for protecting computer displays against eavesdroppers. In the end, we got it working and it is very impressive.
One thing we learned along the way was that selling to government was going to take a while, so in 2009 we started working on PrivateEye, a privacy application for consumers and enterprise (although it turns out government likes it too). By summer 2009 we had our first commercial release, and got a significant amount of press and customer enthusiasm.
It's one thing to have a good product idea, it is quite another to be in the market and selling it. We are there now, and while we have lots of work to do to make it big, we are on the right track and we're getting deals in both the government space Chameleon, as well as consumer and commercial with PrivateEye.
As we start 2010 we're are planning for more growth. Despite the poor economy for raising venture investment, Oculis has gained the confidence of enough groups to close our Series B round. That puts us into a rare group of small technology companies that has received funding in the past year.
It feels really good. It feels like growth.
Bill
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