Meta Co.

Meta Co. was a technology company that developed augmented reality (AR) products. Founded in 2012 by Meron Gribetz, the company aimed to create a more natural machine interface through AR glasses that allowed users to manipulate digital 3D content with intuitive hand gestures. Gribetz, an Israeli entrepreneur who studied computer science and neuroscience at Columbia University, built the first prototype in 2012 by modifying a pair of 3D glasses. The company gained early traction after being accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2013 and successfully raising $194,444 through a Kickstarter campaign the same year.

Meta's primary products were the Meta 1 and Meta 2 Developer Kits. These headsets were tethered to an external PC and featured see-through optical displays, enabling developers to build applications where users could interact with computer-generated holograms in their real-world environment. The Meta 2, launched in 2016 for $949, was positioned as a competitor to Microsoft's HoloLens. The company's business model focused on selling these developer kits to software creators who would, in turn, build a content ecosystem for the hardware. Over its lifetime, Meta raised a total of $83.1 million in funding from investors including Y Combinator, Horizons Ventures, Lenovo, and Tim Draper.

Despite its early promise and significant funding, Meta faced challenges in securing further investment. In September 2018, the company was forced to furlough two-thirds of its workforce after failing to close a new venture capital round. By January 2019, Meta declared itself insolvent after its primary lender foreclosed on the company and sold all of its assets. Following the insolvency, a new company called Meta View acquired Meta's intellectual property in May 2019.

Keywords: augmented reality, AR headsets, gestural interfaces, see-through displays, developer kits, holograms, spatial computing, Y Combinator, Meron Gribetz, Meta 2, optical displays, hand tracking, 3D content manipulation, computer vision, neurointerface