Since 2017 “Support to SME Development in Armenia” (EU-SMEDA) project, which is co-funded by the European Union and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by GIZ PSD SC Regional Programme, in cooperation with Enterprise Incubator Foundation (EIF), has been supporting Armenian startups with two grant competitions.

Being a part of the EU4Business and EU4Innovation Initiatives, EU-SMEDA provides 2 types of grants: Innovation Matching Grant (IMG) and Science and Technology Entrepreneurship (STEP).

With a series of articles, we will be exploring startups that received grant in the framework of the EU-SMEDA project.

ARize is an Augmented Reality platform where everyone can create their own AR samples and use them both for fun and for professional purposes. The creation process doesn’t require any technical skill, it is as easy as making a post in any social platform.

The platform also helps 3D modelers and 2D animators to showcase their art in a new, innovative and easily accessible way. ARize mobile app is available for iOS and Android users.

The team consists of 8 people: 3 co-founders, 3 developers, market development specialist and an accountant.

According to the company CEO and co-founder Aryan Behzadi, the startup is currently entering the European market and already has several clients from the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Spain and Germany.

“Except the European market we have quite active community in Canada, US and content creators from Australia,” he notes.

Previously, the ARize team was working on the development of white label AR apps for companies.

“Then we came up with the idea of creating one universal AR platform where companies can have their accounts, put contents, run campaigns, get all the statistics for evaluating their campaign results. So we created ARize augmented reality platform”.

ARize platform relies on 3 main technologies:

– High-level 3D rendering, which allows rendering high definition 3D models in the real environment;

– Edge computing engine, which is responsible for high speed of sorting and loading data on the platform;

– Image processing technology (Image Recognition, Augmented Reality), which allows interacting with the real environment.

Aryan notes that ARize is the first AR platform, which supports all the “Tilt Brush” effects. Besides, it has already integrated “Google Poly” into the mobile app natively, which makes possible to render all the creations with the exact same effects, materials, and lighting they have been made with.

The startup has received STEP grant in November 2018.

“Initially we created ARize mobile app for AR creation. With STEP grant we are creating the web creation platform which will allow users to create AR samples with 3D models, 2D/3D animations and provide more advanced toolset for AR creation and editing,” Aryan explains.

He notes that the Armenian market is too small and it is really hard to sell something here.

“For this reason, we are mainly concentrated on European and US markets. In this stage, we are cooperating with several European artists who are helping us to form our creators’ community and connect us with art institutions. Parallely, we are working with 5 Armenian museums and trying to develop that culture here,” Aryan tells.

ARize team is planning to release the web creation platform, shape the Creators’ community and increase sales in the nearest future.