LA-based Octi, whose mobile AR tech can apply effects on human movement, raises $7.5M seed, announces NFLPA partnership to create and share NFL player avatars
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Octi's raise lands in the middle of a 2018 funding wave for phone-based AR tooling: weeks earlier Ubiquity6 pulled a $27M Series B to make AR more user-friendly, and by September Illumix had raised an $8.6M seed for dynamic phone-based AR games. What distinguishes Octi is its focus on applying effects to human movement and its anchor customer: the NFLPA, which licenses player likenesses.
The partnership matters because it tests whether athletes' digital likenesses can carry a consumer app rather than just a licensing line item. The related coverage offers a cautionary data point: Artie, which also built AR avatars, later pivoted away from avatars toward mobile games playable inside social media apps, suggesting the avatar-first path was harder to sustain.
First-order effects
- NFL players gain officially licensed, shareable AR avatars built on Octi's movement-effects technology, giving the union a new way to package member likenesses in fan-facing content.
Second-order effects
- Other players' associations and leagues face pressure to strike comparable digital-likeness deals so their athletes aren't absent from the AR content fans are already sharing, while rival mobile-AR startups like Artie and Illumix compete for the same brand-and-sports partnerships to fund distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, athlete likenesses become standard licensed inputs for consumer AR and social-video products — but Artie's later pivot signals that avatar-led apps may need to fold into existing social platforms or gaming formats to survive, making the durability of union-avatar deals genuinely uncertain.
The trend: Sports bodies are beginning to license player likenesses into consumer AR apps, one bet within a broader 2018 wave of venture funding for phone-based AR creation tools.