Kumospace, a provider of immersive spatial video chat, today announced that it has secured $3 million in seed funding led by Boldstart Ventures.

With the recent increase in remote work, Kumospace is “saying goodbye to the boring grid of video conferences” by trying to provide a more immersive and fun environment for video chat. It does this by providing a spatial video and audio chat.

Participants load into 2D virtual rooms that look like a physical world – an office space, cozy lounge, boardroom or a stage – and are presented as webcam or avatars that broadcast their voice audio within a certain range of themselves. Since they can move their avatars in the 2D space they can gather in groups around tables, chairs and in conference rooms to form all sorts of different sorts of social interactions.

“We’re building virtual spaces that combine the fun and creativity of video games with the simplicity and security of video conferencing, transforming conversations into experiences and contacts into relationships,” said Brett Martin, co-founder and president of Kumospace. “We’re emerging from stealth development to give as many hosts as possible a powerful toolkit to fully customize their own virtual environments.”

According to a report from PwC, fewer than one in five executives want to return to the office once the pandemic allows but 87% of office workers say that the office itself is important for collaborating with team members and building relationships – if even they themselves enjoy being remote most of the time.

Makers of tools such as Kumospace hope to build “virtual offices” by bridging the gap between going into the office – which may remain unsafe for quite some time – and remote work, while still retaining the usefulness of collaboration and team-building by putting teams together.

Kumospace is entering an interesting new era where constant remote work, “Zoom fatigue,” Slack and email overwhelm workers from their home offices and couches. Other examples of social platforms that do something similar include Preciate Social, which does something similar but for remote virtual office parties, and Teamflow, also a provider of virtual office meeting services and spatial video that raised $11 million in funding in March.

During the platform’s development from August 2020 to March 2021, Kumospace grew its active user base 100-fold, off an undisclosed base. It currently sees an average session time of more than 60 minutes, and guests have spent hundreds of thousands of hours in Kumospace’s virtual rooms in meetings, presentations, hanging out and collaborating.

The team is currently focusing on building out the platform with more features to allow groups to create and customize their own environments to control their own real estate and build group interaction.

The Kumospace platform takes place entirely in a web browser, so there’s no software to download and install. It’s also free, and the team intends to provide the core product for free indefinitely. Pricing is available on demand for customized and enterprise-level support.

Image: Kumospace