Jersey City augmented reality company receives 2.5 million funding

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Augmented reality (AR) company Apprentice received a significant amount of venture funding last month that they hope will bring their technology to pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs around the state.Augmented reality (AR) company Apprentice received a significant amount of venture funding last month that they hope will bring their technology to pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs around the state.

The Jersey City-based company raised $2.5 million in venture funding from investors Silverton Partners and Hemi Ventures earlier this month. Apprentice already had product deployment across the United States, Asia, Europe and South America but they plan to use the venture funding to release an updated version of their platform in the new year.

The company has caught the interest of Jersey-based companies, a spokesperson for the company said.

“We’re starting to see a huge increase in AR in commercial industries since it’s a cost-effective technology with great revenue generating potential,” said Angelo Stracquatanio, CEO and Co-Founder of Apprentice, in an email to NJBIZ.

Apprentice’s technology allows pharma and biotechnology lab scientists, engineers, technicians and other specialists a method of accessing documents required for complex procedures without relying on traditional pen and paper.

Stracquatanio said the technology could make lab spaces safer and increase efficiency.
“We bring greater control, reliability, and safety to all of these arenas, while preemptively reducing process deviation as well as cost and time expenditures.”

Stracquatanio co-founded the company along with Gary Pignata and Alexandra Buttke in 2014 with the goal of providing AR solutions for problems faced by scientists and engineers in the industries of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

The Apprentice platform is divided into three services.

• Tandem, a teleconferencing tool that allows operators to share what they are seeing with a remote party.
• Manuals, a hands-free tool that allows operators to display vital documents in their field of view.
• BioCapture, a data collection tool.

According to a company spokesperson, Apprentice is the only AR platform that is both Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) compliant.