RosieReality raises $700’000 to teach robotics to children

Late last year RosieReality has closed a pre-seed round led by Shasta Ventures, an influential VC from Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, SF. Next to Shasta, other prominent VCs such as the General Catalyst Scouting Program, Anorak Ventures, and Akatsuki Entertainment Fund joined the round. Akatsuki is the largest Japanese mobile game developer that will help to open up the Japanese gaming market. Next to the money from Silicon Valley RosieReality has accepted some capital from local Swiss Angels.

RosieReality is working on making Augmented Reality accessible for early childhood education. The team develops Rosie, an AR robot for iPhones. Kids of ages 8 and up teach Rosie about programming and science. The team is convinced that early childhood education is one of the main use cases for AR as children profit from a new leaning environment that is natural to their behaviour, contextual, engaging and fun. True multi-dimensional learning hints to what the future of education looks like. Rosie is able to beautifully validate educational AR on iPhones.

The new influx of capital is being used to further develop the team and product. Currently, the start-up is looking for new candidates that will be joining what ramps up to be a global Zürich company. The team will continue to work from its Zürich HQ, which is currently located at the Wyss Centre at ETH but also looks to establish its outpost in San Francisco. The goal is to go global during 2018 and make Augmented Reality accessible to the mainstream customer around the world.

Currently, RosieReality has a private beta released for early Rosie adopters which has already been tested with more than 1000 children. The next step will be to publish a smaller and stable version of Rosie to the Swiss AppStore at the end of the month. The goal is to use the Swiss market to understand what makes a delightful Rosie product for kids and parents. Later in 2018, global expansion will be taken into account. 

(Press release / RAN)