Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) Sensel - With @IlyaRosenberg

Episode Date: January 8, 2022

Our first ever Portfolio Profile, of the first investment the Ride Home Fund ever made! Sensel! As you’ll hear, touch technology as a key layer in computing interface and interaction is about to undergo a major generational leap forward, and Sensel is at the bleeding edge of this transformation. Not only is there a good chance that the next laptop you buy will have Sensel technology inside, but you’ll hear how Sensel’s tech could come to smartphones soon, to medical devices, to automobiles. In essence, Senel’s tech has the potential to radically transform how we interact with computers all across the real world, and even provide a key foundational layer as we build out the metaverse. Sponsors: My First Million Podcast Wix.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the tech meme right home. I'm Brian McCullough, a new kind of bonus episode. Today, we're going to look at one of our ride home fund portfolio companies, Sensal. The idea with these episodes is that we will learn from innovative entrepreneurs and groundbreaking new companies, learning about new technologies right at their earliest stages, which is what sort of makes Sensal kind of an outlier to start off these episodes. When I started the ride home fund, I never imagined that our first investment would be a hardware company and a company that's been around for the better part of a decade. We invested in Sensel's Series B round, when every other investment thus far has been at the seed

round or even earlier. We did so because Sensel was an opportunity we couldn't pass up. As you'll hear, touch technology as a key layer in computing interface and interaction is about to undergo a major generational leap forward, and Sensal is at the bleeding edge of this transformation. Not only is there a good chance that the next laptop you buy will have Sensal technology inside, but you'll hear how Sensel's tech could come to smartphones soon, to medical devices, to automobiles. In essence, Sensel's tech has the potential to radically transform how we interact with computers all across the real world in real life and even provide a key foundational layer as we build out the Metaverse. Sensel reached out to us because they were listeners of this podcast, and I

I encourage any other startups out there who would like the power of the mutant podcast army behind you to get in touch with me directly at Brian at Ride Home Fund.com. But also, if you're interested in learning more about Sensel, as an investor, as a potential technology or business partner, as a potential employee, or merely as a user, again, email me and I'll get you in touch with them or contact Sensel directly. My thanks to all the folks at Sensel, especially Ilya Rosenberg and Christian Hernandez. Thank you for partnering with us. And I can't wait to see how this technology explodes thanks to Sensil's leadership in the years ahead.

Ilya Rosenberg, thank you for coming on the TechMeme Ride Home Experience, a TechMeme Ride Home bonus episode, the first of what hopefully will be several this year. But this is the first sort of portfolio profile episode. And, Ilya, you're the CEO of what was the first investment for the Ride Home Fund. So also it's fitting that you're the first episode. Ilya, you're one of the co-founders of Sensel. So just real quick, like in a two-minute sort of first question. Give me a broad outline of what Sensel is as a company and what technology you guys do. Yeah. So, Brian, great to be on this podcast.

And at a high level, at Sensil, we want to empower people in the way that they interact with their electronic devices. And we want to do that by building the best and most powerful human computer interfaces that really increase dramatically the bandwidth of the interaction that you have with your devices. both in terms of the touch input, including touch sensing and force sensing and other sensing modalities, as well as the output, which includes haptic feedback to the user. And we want to do that because we really believe that, you know, the future that we want to have is not the Wally future where, you know, computers do everything for you, but the future that we're excited about is the future where, We use computers as a tool and people are empowered to be more creative, be more expressive, have more fun, be more productive through their interactions with computers. And in order to do that, we need that interface to continue to improve.

Your background actually, we're going to talk about a lot about hardware, though. I know software interacting with this is a key component. But your background is as a software developer originally, is that right? Yeah, that's correct. I studied computer science and computer graphics, both in my undergraduate at Princeton and my PhD at New York University. And I got interested in computer graphics. It's kind of funny how that happened.

As a kid, I loved lava lamps, and I had a senior project during my undergraduate where I tried to make a virtual lava lamp, basically simulating the physics of the particles and figuring out how to do the rendering. And that's kind of how I got into computer graphics and kind of, I guess that was my first love in terms of the kind of research I was doing. And that led me into the video game industry. I wrote a paper on the techniques that I developed to do this, essentially real-time rendering of a lava lamp. Is that because, sorry to interrupt, and this might be something that I miss heard or something, but I feel like I've heard before that to this day, or at least,

until recently, like in graphics, like modeling things like, you know, water flowing in a stream or like gas diffusing is not necessarily easy to do. Am I right about that or did I miss hear that? Yeah, that's right. It's, yeah, it's one of the most challenging areas in computer graphics because, you know, you have to do the physical simulation of the fluid, you know, either like particle simulation or a voxel-based simulation and the physics of that is quite complex but then you know to do something that's you know fun like a lava lamp you also need to render that in real time and make it look really nice and realistic so it is it is challenging both from the simulation side and the rendering rendering and we were trying to do that in real time so that that makes it even more complex whereas you know when you watch these effects in a pixar movie you know they're off and taking, you know, days and months to render those effects. But we were doing it, you know, in real time, you know,

as you're running the simulation. So that leads you to your first startup, a gaming startup, I guess? Yeah, that's right. Around the time that the first iPhone came out, we decided to try to take some of that technology that I developed. And I also had a friend that was also really into like fluid simulation and gaming.

And we started a company to take that technology and turn that into iPhone games. So we actually built one of the first apps that was on the App Store, and it was an app called I-Lava, and it was basically a virtual lava lamp for your iPhone. And we built a bunch of other physics-based, fluid-based games for the iPhone. So how does that lead into a ton of? hardware technology and stuff? Yeah, so I, someone at Valve software saw some of these software demos that I was building and invited me to come do like an internship and a consulting gig at Valve.

So I spent about a year working with Valve and actually built some of our technology into their engine, into the steam engine. And so actually, if you play Portal 2, there's a lot of puzzles that are based on liquids, and those games use the technology that I developed. It was an engine blobulator, is what we called it. And then during, kind of while I was working at Valve and around that time, I started to come to the,

realization that, you know, graphics was increasing and improving at an exponential rate, both in terms of the hardware and the software. But really, there was still this big bottleneck in terms of how we interact with our computers. I was also, like, at the time, trying to write, you know, try to build some software. You can do like virtual clay modeling, you know, using the same engine and other kind of experiences. And I realized, like, wow, it's really, you know, really hard to do any of this with a keyboard and mouse. Like the thing that's really missing is not the hardware and the software, not the video graphics hardware and the soft video,

video graphical software. It's really the interfaces that are deficient to get to the next level of experiences that I wanted to kind of to see happen. That's kind of what got me into the hardware side of things. And so that's startup number two, I'm assuming, which is Touchco. Um, yeah, so funny enough, there was another startup in there, something I did parallel to Gotham Wave Games, which was, um, Gotham Wave Games, my experience doing that and this other startup led to TouchCo. Um, and this other startup, um, it's a whole other tangent, but, uh, um, it was a company called Smart Lines. And we were developing, um, actually sensors that would get embedded into tennis courts, um, to detect if the tennis ball was in or out.

So that's kind of how I got exposed to the sensing hardware side of things. Because for what we were doing there, we had this big challenge where we wanted to detect the impact of a tennis ball on the surface of the court, but also know, you know, is it in or out? So you need really high precision for that. And also, you need to ignore something like a footstep. So if the player steps on the line, you don't want it to buzz or whatever. And this was around the time of the Serena Williams controversy at the U.S. Open, where she had lost the game because of a bad line call.

And the International Tennis Federation put out a kind of a request for people to submit their ideas for how to fix line calling in tennis. So we were one of the systems that went after the ITF certification. And we essentially built out several of these tennis courts with sensors. And it was system work that was awesome. But the company, you know, we took some bad investments and kind of ran out of money. And so this was around the same time I was doing Gotham Wave games. So I was kind of trying to do two startups in parallel. and I and doing the stuff with valve and and then I had this idea like oh could we just take some of this

hardware that we were developing for Smartline some of the you know kind of the concepts and miniaturize it and build a sensor that you can have on your desk that could you know sense your touch your pressure and so I kind of kind of combined these two I guess areas that I've been working in to one, and that was the start of touchco. Well, and it's so funny. We're going to talk about the technology that is behind what sensile does, but I can see how all that, I can see the linear progression there of like, you know, sensitive sensing on a tennis court and keep being false positives out of it and things like that and having actual like

force touch and sensitive detection of force and stuff like that. So let me, so then that technology is miniaturized. That's what goes into TouchCo. Touchco is acquired by Amazon, and some of that stuff goes into Kindle technology? Yeah. So at Touchco, we, kind of like you were mentioning, we took the technology, we miniaturized it, and we built this really high-resolution, pressure-sensitive touch. technology and we were kind of you know we had a cool technology looking for an

application so we were talking to a lot of different companies about you know different ways we could apply it Amazon saw what we were doing and at the time they they had just released the first Kindle and they were looking for a way to add touch sensitivity to the Kindle but they didn't want to put a touch sensor on top of the display because that would decrease the contrast and the brightness of it, especially for an e-ink reflective display. If you put anything on top of it, it really kills the look of that display because there's no backlighting. So the idea was to put a flexible e-ink display on top of one of our sensors.

So there's absolutely no optical impact and build this awesome, you know, Kindle reader that looks beautiful, but you have a touch sensor. And you have to remember, like, the early Kindle reader, they were very like steampunk. They had like mechanical for changing the page and they had like mechanical keyboards and the scroll wheel.

It was like very, very retro. And so they ended up acquiring touch code to bring that expertise that we had in developing touch sensing technology into Amazon to help them,

you know, kind of build a better user experience for the Kindle. Well, I'm assuming that was used in the Kindle Voyage, which is my favorite version of the Kindle. For whatever reason, I buy Kindles like people buy cell phones. Every time there's a new one, I get one. And the Voyage was my favorite version of that.

So I'm assuming that was your technology in there somewhere. Yeah. So actually, Aaron Zaraga, who's my co-founder at my new company, Sensul, at what we're talking about today, and myself, we took some of that touch-co technology, And we invented a way to do a virtual page turn button on the Kindle Voyage. And that was called the page press feature. And the idea behind it was that we actually embedded force sensors under the glass of the display around the bezel.

And we also added in a haptic actuator technology. And by combining the force sensing and the haptics, we were able to basically virtually emulate a physical button click. So it felt like you were clicking a mechanical button, but really you were just pressing on a force sensor, and then at the right force level, a mechanic, you know, a haptic click was was actuated to simulate the feel of that button. And this was really the first high volume consumer electronic device that I know of that had this kind of technology. It came out, you know, prior to the Apple Watch, which was Apple's first. product to have haptics force and haptics um and uh and it was it was really exciting to you know to see some of the touch go technology that we had developed um you know shipping in high volume and tens of millions of units so um that was that was a pretty awesome experience well let's let's not dilly dally any further so uh sensile i think was founded uh in 2013 is that

right yes that's right and so i'm assuming the idea was to continue along these lines and take it to the next generation stuff. So instead of having you recall all of the steps to where we are today, take me to the present day to what Sensel is doing now, to the smart surface, and just generally this next generation of touch that Sensel is bringing into the world right now. Yeah, so really what we're trying to do is make, you know, integrate touch sensing, force sensing, and haptics, integrate that altogether and make that available as a, you know, kind of in a packaged form to major OEMs in the PC and mobile industries and other industries as well. Really what we've really focused on at Senssel is this concept of smart surface where we're really combining these technologies to make a very seamless very rich experience for the user and it actually turns out that you know combining touch force and haptics having the best in class user experience and all three of those and doing it in a cost-effective you know an efficient way and

power efficient and, you know, thin. It's actually a very complex problem to combine those technologies. And most companies that have been around and that are in the industry that do touch sensing, force sensing, or haptics, they really have expertise in only one of those areas. And where we've really found our niche and where we've had a lot of success is in that we understand all three of these. technologies. We have deep experience and intellectual property in all three of these technologies, and we can deliver a full solution to the customer, so they don't have to worry about and try to figure out how to source three different components, how to combine them, how to write all the

firmware and the software and build out the user experiences. We do all that for them in a very high performance and cost-effective way. So one way maybe, you know, normal folks would understand this is, let's think of laptops right now. So like if people are old enough to remember, like, you know, 20 years ago, on a laptop, you'd have a touchpad plus physical buttons.

And then, you know, starting about 10 years ago, it switches to clickpads where you get rid of the physical buttons. And so this is, moving from just having touch to then having haptic feedbacks and things like that. And so explain to me what this next generation is. Obviously, there are no physical buttons. That's ancient history.

But what can I do if I have a sensile device in my laptop in the near future, what can I do with it that I can't do right now with a touchpad on my laptop? So there's kind of a spectrum of advantages that you get when you start to integrate senseless technology and, you know, haptic force sensing in general. And the first kind of, you know, if you start kind of more at the hardware side and the industrial design side, which is usually the first thing that the customer, like our customers, which are in the laptop and mobile OEMs that they care about.

Those first things are usually around the industrial design. It's how big of a touch pad can I build? And mechanical touchpad just does not scale. If you try to make a big mechanical touch pad with a little click button underneath, it just starts to fail mechanically as it gets bigger because of flatness tolerances and stiffness and all these kind of things. So that's kind of the first thing is like I can grow the touch pad bigger. And then also as the touch pad gets bigger, you need it to get thinner because if you just grow it in X and Y,

but you keep the same Z height, the thickness as a traditional mechanical click pad, you start to really consume a lot of the volume that's internal to the device. And so you have less space for battery, you have less space for other computing things. that are in the laptop. So those are kind of like the higher level things that the customers often care about is like, how big can I make the touch pad, how thin can I make it? But then you go a level deeper and you really start to see there's a lot of user experience benefits. And again, there's kind of a hierarchy of like there's some very basic things that you get.

Things like you can do much better palm rejection. So as you have a bigger touchpad, you're more likely to rest your palm on it inadvertently. You might not even notice it. But you don't want your palm to click accidentally. If you just have your hand on the keyboard of a touchpad, or you have your hand on the keyboard because you're typing, but part of your palm is touching the touchpad. You don't want a false click or false activate. With a haptic force pad, we can, in software, determine, oh, that's a palm.

we're going to ignore the force or the location of that palm, because we know that the user isn't purposely trying to press there. And at the same time, if I have my other finger on the touch pad, if I have my left hand on my touching with a palm, my right hand I'm trying to click, I can at the same time see that that is an intentional touch, and I can trigger a click for that finger. And then just in general,

being able to click anywhere on the surface with a consistent force, that is a huge benefit because that allows you to be much faster, much more efficient, you know, have much less fatigue. So there's not like a hot zone on one of these. Everything is the hot zone, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, like on a traditional click pad, the bottom edge clicks, but as you go higher and higher, it gets harder and harder to click because the touchpad is essentially acting as a lever.

And so we eliminate that. We can make a consistent click force. everywhere. And then, you know, going a little bit deeper, you can start to customize those effects. So you can have different forces for different types of clicks. So, for example, if I'm, you know, filling out a form and I go to click on a submit button, I might want to make that button have a little bit of higher activation force to, again, to avoid like an accidental click. I might want to give you some feedback. So if you click, you know, submit on a form, but you've forgotten to fill out some fields, the touchpad can buzz.

And then if you've done everything correctly, you can have a different kind of click field to tell you that you've, you know, you've submitted successfully. And then there's all sorts of dimensions to the feedback that you can get. But also as a user, I can, go into the software and I can tweak it to my own personal needs or likes, I guess, right? Yeah, I mean, you can customize the amount of force that it takes to press. You know, if you've got a big hand and, you know, large fingers,

you might want to customize the palm rejection to be less strict and you might want to have a higher click force. If you've got, you know, smaller fingers and you press lighter, you might want to customize it the other way. people have very different preferences in terms of the amount of feedback they like for the click. Some people like a really strong click. Some people like it lighter. And why this might be important is, am I right in assuming that you're talking about making a larger touch area on, say, a laptop? Could I, like, basically make the entire bottom part of the laptop be functionally the click zone? And so then there's different areas where I can do different things. And that's when you're talking about the palm rejection and stuff like that.

Definitely. And that's, you know, that's kind of our longer-term vision is that these surfaces will start to get larger. They start to get, so they will start to take over the whole palm rest area of the laptop. And we already have programs where we're developing, you know, user experiences like that. And yeah, so you can start to have, you know, not just a touch surface that's for, you know, controlling a mouse. But as these surfaces get larger, you can imagine being able to write or sketch or signatures on that surface, you can start to imagine multi-hand control where you're using both hands in a game or in an artistic use case. Maybe you're using your left hand to position a piece of virtual paper and your right hand to sketch. And then longer term beyond that, there's no reason that that we should really have mechanical click pads forever. Like if you imagine the future, it's hard to imagine that we're still going to have these mechanical keys.

And where we are going with our technology is eventually being able to replace that mechanical keyboard, but have a user experience that is at least as good, if not better than you had on your mechanical keyboard. And some of the things we imagine being able to do at a very basic level is like you can reconfigure that keyboard. So you can change the language, you can change a layout, you can change, you know, it doesn't have to be a keyboard for typing, you know, words and letters. It can be a piano keyboard or a DJ controller. And we've actually explored a lot of these concepts in some of our early products. But making that more ubiquitous, you know, where every laptop can be this kind of very versatile, morphable, creative control surface. And then there's, you know, then there's more mundane things like, being able to do better autocorrect, learning from the patterns of how the user types, and even having a keyboard that conforms to your hands versus having to conform to the shape of a keyboard. All of those things become possible when that surface goes from being a mechanical fixed thing to being a virtual software controlled thing.

Right, because essentially it becomes programmable. And by the way, I'd encourage people, if you want to Google some of Sensils products, they've already created some hardware tools for musicians and the like for these sorts of things. But is what you're saying, you know, sort of this sci-fi, you know, Star Trek, the next generation dream of having, you know, a surface that you can type on, which right now people, you know, rightfully so don't like because it feels like I'm typing on a piece of glass. But are you saying ultimately the, dream is in this area of what you can do for me to be able to type on a virtual keyboard

and be able to do it without looking at it because the feedback is so accurate and so good that it'll feel or at least be similar to using a mechanical keyboard. Exactly. And what we can do today with the technology we've developed already is we can simulate the force sensitivity of the keyboard so we know exactly how hard you're pressing with every finger, and we can provide a very realistic click. So when you press on it, it really feels like you're pressing down and hitting a key. The holy grail and the part that we haven't solved yet,

but we want to solve in the near future is how do you, being able to feel the keyboard. So you can close your eyes and move your hands around the keyboard. You can feel the little nubbs under the FNJ keys. And you can really type with your eyes closed on a mechanical keyboard today, how can we replicate that virtually? And that's, you know, where I want to take the company in the future is being able to do that kind of user experience. And we do think it's totally within the realm of possibility, but it's a very hard problem because, you know, you need to stimulate the receptors in the human finger to give you that tactile feedback.

But that's certainly where we see these interfaces going. And like you said, it's really that the vision is like the Star Trek, the next generation interface where, you know, wherever you go on the spaceship, whatever thing you're doing, you're always using these surfaces, right? And they may be different, you know, whether you're the pilot or you're the engineer or the communications officer, you might have a different, different interface, but the underlying technology is all the same technology and it's extremely

versatile and extremely, you know, high bandwidth kind of controls. So you can have that really seamless interface for whatever you're doing. Right. The idea being like, you know, forget how your car maybe could be programmed for different drivers. Like someday you could sit in in front of a compute device and it would automatically configure itself for your needs or, you know. So put a pin in that because I want to come back to that at the end and talk about, you know, VR Metaverse stuff, which I can see this would maybe come to. But so right now today, primarily Senssel is putting these modules into into things like laptops because I believe like Windows 11, has haptic force pads support and things like that.

So these are increasingly coming into machines produced by OEMs. Like what I can already see or I can already buy some laptops that have sensile inside them, correct? Yeah, that's right. So our first product was a product we shipped ourselves. It was called the Sensile Morph. And we actually funded that through a Kickstarter in 2015, ship, and started shipping it in 2017.

And then early last year in January and 21, our second product was announced, and that is a haptic touchpad that was embedded into Lenovo's top-of-the-line titanium product. And that was really the first time you saw a haptic force pad outside of a MacBook, you know, in the PC world, that was a really high performance. really great user experience. And then our second product in the market was a technology. We actually work with Microsoft on.

So the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio uses some of our technology for their haptic force pad. We didn't develop that force pad, but we kind of worked with Microsoft and helped them to integrate some of our technology to give them really awesome haptics. And what we're working on now, is really making those technologies ubiquitous,

bringing down the cost, scaling up the production capability, and bringing those to a lot more computers in the near future. And like you mentioned, Microsoft did add software support in the OS for haptics, and that's really been very beneficial for us in terms of accelerating the adoption in the PC ecosystem as well. Well, speaking of adoption, I mean, when we spoke before, I think that you had mentioned that if you think of this as like generational change in the technology, that when this last happened, when, you know, generally laptops switched to clickpads, like it happened really quickly like in a matter of four or five years, right? Yeah, yeah.

I think once the first clickpad came out, it was very rapid. And, you know, people thought it would, you know, there's a lot of people that were like, I love my buttons. I never want to get rid of my physical buttons on my touchpad or my click pad. And then, you know, kind of overnight, that kind of design just became outdated. And you really don't see, you know, any laptops on the market with mechanical clickpads anymore, you know, outside of a few like ruggedized laptops that the military uses. That's just disappeared. And so I think there's going to be a similar, you know, really rapid transition that's going to happen towards haptic force pads because, you know, nobody wants to be, you know, nobody wants to ship an outdated design that, you know, in the consumer electronics world, there's kind of these trends, right?

And I think there's definitely a trend towards, you know, more simple, more elegant designs, you know, getting rid of mechanical buttons, getting rid of ports, and creating these, you know, really beautiful, seamless user experiences. So these are the years of the force pad coming to your next laptop will hopefully likely have force pad technology inside it. But we haven't even, you mentioned the rugged laptops. One of the things that we haven't. talked about or mentioned in terms of what sensuals technology is good for is, you can use it wearing gloves. You can use it in wet environments, all sorts of stuff. So that also speaks to ways that this technology can evolve beyond even just laptops or even smartphones. Definitely. It's one of the benefits of having richer sensing in general. In our technology that we've developed, we have force sensing and the force sensing can function as a fallback to the capacitive touch because capacitive touch fails in certain circumstances. It's generally a great technology, but if you have moisture, if you're using gloves, if you have electromagnetic interference, capacitive touch can have false touches or just not function properly. And so by

adding richer sensing modalities, you can make that capacitive touch sensor more robust. So we do have technologies that are really good for situations where maybe it's in a medical environment and you need to make sure that, you know, was that really intentional because any unexpected click could have some bad consequences. And then we even have technologies that can work fully underwater, for example, or just in drenching rain and the sensor continues to function perfectly. So that's some of the advantages that I think, kind of in the longer tail of what we can do as a company,

that we can really benefit from. So this is imagining this sort of technology on heavy-duty hardware out on a construction site or as you're saying like in a hospital where people need to use it while still wearing gloves and things like that. So if you combine that, this ability to use it in all sorts of settings that you couldn't use touch technology before, if you combine that with the fact that we can increase the size of it, it's not like a little you know, Post-it note-size thing, you could like, could we one day

have the entire dashboard of a car, essentially be a smart surface that, again, which would solve problems because what people complain about with their Teslas is, is like, I need the knob. Like, you know, I'm missing that ability to turn the air up and down by not even looking at it, right?

Yeah, I mean, we can solve the two biggest problems of a touch sensor, you know, in a car, which is one is like you don't know if you've pressed it because you don't have any feedback. And the second is you don't know where you are because you're looking, you know, you're looking ahead at the road. So you don't know if you're, you know, you're on the volume control button or you're on the temperature, you know, or you've slipped off because you hit a bump. You know, we can bring back some of that tactility that we lost with physical controls.

and in a car, it's interesting because you have a lot of these surfaces. You know, you have controls for the windows and doors. You have controls, you know, the main console, but you've also got steering wheels and palm rest. So there's a lot of, you know, a lot of areas, a lot of opportunities for some of our technology that we've been developing to enhance those experiences. So also, if you achieve your dream of, you know, having the real 3D feedback and stuff like that, then we are talking about solving the holy grail problem of the VR and the Metaverse,

where in future, you don't even have to look at it, but you can get actual feedback in touch that might be tied to what you're doing in some sort of AR or VR environment. Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the things I'm personally really excited about is the possibilities of AR because once you have an AR, a really good AR display that you're wearing in the form of goggles or glasses, any surface that you interact with can become this smart virtual surface. But you're still going to need some way to sense the touch, to sense. the force to provide feedback. So we can start to imagine, you know, we have, you know, we have these larger touch surfaces that can be, you know, anywhere in your house, on your table, on your wall.

And then as soon as you approach them, you know, the AR display can overlay graphics onto those surfaces. But you can still have that rich tactility and feedback. You don't have to just do gestures in the air. you can have something physical that you're interacting with, but that you've got visual representations also overlaid on top of. So I think it's going to be a really exciting space to explore. The display technology really hasn't been there up till now

to make those experiences really great. But there's a lot of rumors out there and speculation that a lot of that is being solved, solved and that we're going to see some really great products around some of those display technologies coming out. And we're really excited about being able to help augment those experiences with some of our touch force and haptics technology. Well, I think we can announce or confirm, obviously, by doing this episode that Right Houghton Fund was an investor in your series B. So, next couple years, next 18 months or so, going to be exciting times for Senssel?

Definitely, definitely. Yeah, we closed the first half of our series B earlier, or I guess at the end of 21. And I can announce we closed $9 million. I was led by a Taiwanese CM called Global Lighting Technologies that actually specializes in a lot of really cool lighting. technology that's very complementary to what we do with our touch sensing and haptics technology and we are really excited you know to have ride home fun be a part of that round and we are also looking to close another nine million dollars in the near future and that's well underway and yeah we're going to take take

that funding to accelerate you know the the development of our technology technologies and the scale up of production. So I think in the very near future, you're going to see a lot more of sense of technology and a lot more of the products that you use every day. And really the goal is for someday this technology to become ubiquitous and kind of in a lot of places where you're going to be interacting with electronic devices.

Well, and the idea behind doing this, the way we're doing it is that all of the right home audience hopefully can become excited about this technology too. And to that end, if people want to find out more, should people start asking for make sure there's sensile inside when they buy a laptop? Do you have any asks for the audience in terms of just generally tell us how we can continue to be fans of sensile, going forward? Yeah, I think the best way is just to pay attention to the kind of the interaction technology that you're using in your devices. When you're buying a laptop, check out what kind of touch sensor, is it using? Is there is there is there haptic feedback?

Is there force feedback? And kind of tell your friends about it. A lot of people, it's funny, like a lot of people that use Apple products get used to a certain user experience and they're shocked when they go and try other products. They try a PC and they're like, oh, wow, this touchpad is terrible. But people don't realize why that is. They don't realize that Apple's invested probably hundreds and millions of dollars to develop that touchpad or that keyboard or the touch sensor on their iPhone. And there's a lot of really cool technology that goes into that. And, you know, but there's no reason that it should be limited to the products of one company.

We need to, you know, start to bring these better user experiences to other products, other technologies in our lives. And that's what Sun Solith is doing. So I think, yeah, just be more aware of your interactions with technology. I think be more discerning, I guess, and demanding of products that you buy that they do invest in making these interactions better because, I mean, these technologies are, you know, we're using them day in and day out. And especially, you know, with what we've had over the last few years with that pandemic, I mean, we're, you know, doing work remotely. We're studying remotely. We're using our computers all day.

like why shouldn't we have better, you know, better interaction technologies for these things that we're doing, doing all day? You know, these technologies should be, they should really be optimized for the person rather than the person having to, you know, train themselves and fit themselves into a mold or a box of how they use their technology. And that's what we're trying to do at Sensal. No more conforming to the hardware. The hardware conforms to you. Yes.

Listen, anybody out there listening, if this is interesting to you and exciting, get in touch with me, and I will pass you along to Sensel. But, Ilya, thank you so much for being the first to come on and tell us about your company and very exciting times ahead. And happy 2022. Thank you, Brian. It's been really fun talking to you. Thank you for the opportunity and for the investment. And happy 2022 to you. and all your listeners as well.