 Hi, so please introduce yourself. My name is Sergei Nestimitiam, founder of Excite. Excite is a multiplayer AR adventures platform connecting metaverse experiences with real-world scenarios. And what do you show here? That's the Excite app. You can see what's available through the camera app. You can see holograms on top of the cafeterias in front of the places and on top of the people's head. That's a hologram avatar like in a multiplayer setting. There are different scenarios supported like let's say I go to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert and around the stadium there are album covers. You can collect them and get some tickets for free for the concert. So yeah, it's a multiplayer and it's a platform so anybody else can create adventures on our platform for businesses, for personal use cases or if you have a passion about some type of sport or something like that. So actually it's like Pokemon Go but actually useful. Yes, exactly. In this dimension you can communicate with the world through camera with businesses through gamified scenarios and it's not only useful but it's also a multiplayer one. Multiplayer on the cloud, just in your app. Is it like an app that you can sell to other brands and they can use the technology behind for their events and everything? Yes, yes. Other businesses can create an adventure on our platform and engage their audience like adding digital sort of slice, digital layer onto this world. So we don't believe in a metaverse like some virtual realm where we live in as a shiny avatar so instead we believe that the main slice, the main sort of level of the metaverse is this world because everyone has digital information about them, every object has digital information and with X-Site we can communicate with this digital information in this world through the camera in a gamified way. On your video it looks very precise everything. In the app is it going to be that? How does it know that this person needs to have this thing on top? Oh you need to have an app and you enable. Well every person needs to be part of the app? Yes, yes. You will only see the hologram for people who enter the same game as you and you sort of you know how in the game like in Fortnite you have something on top of your character like an avatar on top of your character. So this avatar says your name or you know YouTube link whatever there is. That's the same an avatar for the person inside a game. So yes all the holograms for people they have to be enabled and yes we recognize people on every single frame and the good thing you know what we don't use facial recognition. Instead we recognize people with our algorithm which is called onion recognition layer by layer starting from location followed by the style of your t-shirt, style of your shoes and many other sort of visual characteristics excluding your face. Does it work? Yes. Because this is like it looks totally like the upload TV show or something. It looks like but how good does it look in real life? Let's see. Now I'm getting used to it. You have the app? Yes, yes absolutely it's live. And then your colleague is on it? I think so, yes let me show you. You see the hologram? It appears it's an empty profile right now we have plenty of profiles and I can add him to my team or I can so I say he's a business co-founder and you see there are holograms on the street like you can walk around the conference and collect some of them and you can message him and say hi Dima like how are you doing and things like that. And also there are many many other sort of mini games like this is a build your unicorn team adventure, draw something if you want to find some food and drinks and things like that so they should appear, yeah. Is he in the game too or you just add anyone? No we just talked and they downloaded the app and enabled this to be able to recognize you. Really? Yeah. Do you need to know where the phones are? Yes. Geolocation everybody's sharing their positions? Yes, yes until you turn it off. Do they have outdoors or inside? Yeah that's a good point. We actually run a conference pilot and some of those conferences was underground so that didn't work at all well for us. Can you use some kind of Wi-Fi and stuff indoor GP like they use Bluetooth location stuff? Yes it's possible but we don't use it. Right now we use GPS and we track where the camera is looking and we sort of you can think of like what would be that point in the space if you solve some trigonometry and plus we recognize people and their sort of identity on each single frame like through machine learning on the edge like we don't send the images to the cloud to recognize it we recognize it on the device. You could maybe add the conference what you call it like indoor navigation or what you call it interacting and stuff like that. Like matchmaking? Yeah matchmaking. Exactly you can point the camera to me or to anybody else here and send me a message and we can start chatting on X-Side as well. Even singles evenings. Exactly that's one of the adventures that can be created on our platform. So what we decided we don't want to spread too much between use cases we just concentrated on gaming and being a platform so that singles or dating or conferences or anybody else they can create whatever they want and whatever solves their business problem and we will help them. We will allow this sort of you know like a lens which you can use to enter this dimension. And you can switch to a different mode when you are close to a specific event and then you have this activated only when you're there. Certain adventures are global and certain other certain adventures for example there is an adventure for this conference to build your unicorn team and pitch your startup. It's only available here previously it was available on the TechCrunch Disrupt in October. So you were where where was the TechCrunch Disrupt in the US? Yeah yeah it was in San Francisco in the US. And what did they think? It was quite successful like we found investors committed for 600,000 out of 1 million that we are raising right now and yeah we came here to finish the round. Are they competitors trying to do something similar? Yes we had a very strong competitor who like I don't want to just call their name but they actually did exactly what we did but with facial recognition and because it's prohibited in European Union and in US they got sued they had to pivot to be a video editing tool and they paid some fines. There are other competitors who do things for cars or like for example a company BlueVision Labs they did absolutely the same but for the car and they got acquired by company Lyft which is a competitor of Uber in the United States. So yes this technology is present on the market but people use it in different ways and we believe that. They try to do it for cars? Yes I mean we can do this for cars as well. So when the Lyft car arrives? Yeah you can point the camera and see which car it is. Which car it is? Yes yes yes. It works already in Lyft? I think they're going to launch this soon. Yes yes they acquired the company but they did not integrate this yet. How about somebody has another app idea and they want to use your technology they can work with you together and do something else or you want to be the app for everybody to use? Absolutely they can create an adventure on our platform or they can contact us how we can help them to integrate with us. So right now the plan is to make the adventure creation as easy as possible so that you can just you know click click click or maybe even send a message to the chatbot and it will create an adventure for you. However there was also an idea that you can embed our SDK inside somebody else's app like in the dating app and then they will see like a nice sort of heart-like pinkish avatars instead of our default avatars. Yeah that is possible that's not sort of right now in production. So you're the founder and CEO and is this your colleague? Yes yes this is Mitra our head of design. Dima our head of design and Alex is my co-founder in Kiev. He is in Kiev in Ukraine and there is another person who is not right now with us. Where do you live? I live in Sydney in Australia for the last five years. I'm Ukrainian and I moved to Sydney like five years ago. Mitra lives here in Spain. In Spain? Yeah. Which one is best Sydney or Spain? Sydney absolutely. Why? The best one is Kiev in Ukraine man. Unfortunately not right now but yeah the best one is Kiev. Kiev more than Sydney. Is it true that Ukrainian guys are the best software engineers in the world? Well that wouldn't be modest and we were you know educated and hardest in a way that like you have to be modest in your life. Because this is pretty hardcore the stuff. Yeah. And you're actually doing this? Yeah. I can tell you. Or do you have a huge team behind you? No that's an interesting part I want to show this to you because that's all deserving that's all because of my team. That's me. I'll turn this. Yeah. Right there. Yeah. And maybe you can also explain a little bit to your background what you did before and stuff like that. Yeah. That's me. My name is Sergei. I worked at Atlassian and I was always passionate about computer vision and here we go like communicating with the world through camera. Alex he built a game dev studio in Ukraine and he is still living in Kiev Ukraine and the people on my team like for example Nikola he works at Google actually right now. We haven't started you know we haven't went into the full-time track he used to help us before Google and Mitra is here. David my brother he is a very proficient machine learning expert worked previously in companies like Reface for example and many others. So yeah we've got quite an international team right now internationally located but however they all are Ukrainians. This guy by the way Alexander Kirillin he's on the front lines protecting Ukraine right now. So yeah yeah he's also Ukraine. Okay. Okay. I hope everybody stays safe. And this finishes so you can focus on technology. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Thanks a lot. This is awesome. I'd like to see more demos on your website on your YouTube channel or the reason you can just download this and start playing with it. Yes. Yes. The app is available. There is a couple of adventures not thousands as I promised but it's coming you know. There are a couple of adventures. It's available on the Play Store and App Store and yeah you can download it and play with it and we can exchange contacts and I can send you more videos. You know how those funny guys who did the Pokemon Go that kind of team and the way they launched as far as I understand it's just some kind of AI that just added a bunch of Pokemon all over the world. They didn't have to manually go and start adventures. Yeah. Could you do something like that where it just works all over the world? It's already thousands of crypto coins like coins that are going to be transferred into crypto already on the streets of Barcelona and Europe and the United States. So we did this. However, what they had is a very expensive franchise like a Pokemon. They also own Harry Potter franchise for gaming. You don't need that. I mean yes and no. So when it gets to collect something it kind of resonated very well with Pokemon. You know you collected Pokemon in the original scenario so yeah it resonated well. However, we will go with just many custom adventures instead of like one big franchise. And then a customer needs to pay to make an adventure? Yeah. As I told you before general public can create adventures for free and then if you're passionate about soccer that's free, create an adventure all good but if you can create more sophisticated adventure and charge for that. I take a card, Excite takes a card and then if a business wants to create an adventure they have to assign coin value into three-dimensional objects and they have to buy those coins from us. That's how we charge businesses into B2B but not as an advertisement so we are not targeting this to particular users instead we allow those businesses to sort of engage with their audience in a new way like through the camera. So you're using crypto also? Yes. Yes. It's a Web3 powered startup. Yes, yes, yes. But you could do stuff without the crypto? If people want not to use crypto or everything is crypto? I mean, yeah obviously like those games for businesses they don't have to be crypto and they can be like just a virtual sort of currency within the app. Like for example if you want to create an adventure you just pay certain amount of money you get those like number of objects that you can use in your app. So meaning if you are a small coffee shop in Barcelona you will only pay this you know for a small adventure because you want to attract like 500 people maybe 1000 people. But if you are a McDonald's you want to attract maybe 100,000 people or you know make them more happy about your products so you're gonna pay more because of like wider scale of such adventure. Cool. Thanks a lot. Thank you.