Sturfee

Sturfee, established in 2015 and headquartered in Milpitas, CA, specializes in preparing cities and countries for augmented reality (AR) experiences. The company’s core technology, the Visual Positioning Service (VPS), powers AR experiences over entire cities by providing instant localization to determine a user’s position and orientation. This service utilizes high-resolution satellite imaging to analyze and organize ground data, creating a 3D mesh of the city and transforming it into machine-readable fingerprint maps. Computer vision algorithms then extract visual fingerprints from the user’s ground camera to pinpoint their exact location, with localization speeds of about 3 seconds on a 4G network and efforts to reduce this to 1 second. Sturfee’s VPS is optimized for outdoor use and is available in major U.S. cities such as San Francisco, NYC (Manhattan), San Jose, and Los Angeles, as well as internationally in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, and Dubai. The company supports multi-user interactions, allowing multiple users to work and play in the same AR experience, and ensures that digital objects remain in the real world even after the app is turned off. Sturfee also offers 3D geometry detection for occlusion and interaction with ground and buildings, and provides a digital twin service to create digital replicas of real-world spaces using smartphones. The company is exploring non-AR use cases such as drones and autonomous vehicles. Sturfee’s technology is designed to create core spatial intelligence for devices to accurately understand their local surroundings, offering a simple SDK to connect to its VPS cloud service.