COMPANY

Name: Xent Studios

Legal Name: XentStudios, LLC

Location: Chicago, IL

Founded: 2017

Founder(s): Davinder Kohli

Website: https://www.xentstudios.com/

Social Media: Following: 86 Followers on Twitter, 27 Followers on LinkedIn, 52 Followers on Instagram

INDUSTRY – VR/AR in Construction/Kitchen & Bath

Size: Global VR/AR market valued at $26.7B in 2018 (Source: Zion Market Research)

Projections:

Global VR/AR market projected to hit $814.7Bn by 2025, at a CAGR of 63.01% between 2019 and 2025  (Source: Zion Market Research).  Global VR/AR market in Real Estate projected to hit revenues of $750Mn by 2020 and $2.6Bn by 2025 (Source: Goldman Sachs Report, January 2016)

Introduction

Xent Studios is a VR/AR startup providing immersive and interactive displays as a service to Kitchen & Bath retailers and suppliers. The company claims to help customers reduce sales time and increase conversions by allowing customers to visualize different combinations of kitchen and bath fittings using a Virtual Reality solution that they can deploy within their own store. The company is also working on an AR app which will allow users to visualize products in their own home.

The Product

Xent provides Xentify VR and Xentify AR as display-as-a-service offerings to Kitchen & Bath retailers and claims to help increase conversion by 30%, reduce sales cycle periods by 32% and cost the supplier approximately $31/year for every product combination. These data points were collected by Xent Studios from their engagement with United Granite & Marble, as their talk at LatinX Incubator on YouTube indicates.

Xentify VR allows customers to visualize any possible combination of products and finishes. This helps customers pick the right combination of countertops, flooring, cabinets, faucets, and appliances together. Setting up a VR in-store system requires 64 sq.ft. of open area, TV, VR-enabled desktop, and VR equipment – headsets, sensors, and controllers. In addition to aiding in customer decision-making, Xentify VR also providers retailers and distributors heat maps and customer reactions to get effective feedback on their products.

Xentify AR is Xent Studio’s upcoming AR app which will be offered as a white-label solution to kitchen & bath retailers. It will allow customers to visualize products as they would look in their own home, helping them choose the right variant and creating a high-value prospect early in the sales cycle.

Xent Studios has also developed the XentSDK, which allows VR/AR developers to showcase their work. Davinder’s YouTube channel also has a video showcasing the SDK’s potential application in controlling IoT devices.

Origin and Founding Team

Davinder Kohli, the Founder and CEO of Xent Studios, has been working in senior technology roles since 2002 and has worked in Chicago for more than 15 years. In this time, he has worked for brands such as Motorola; engaged with clients such as Nielsen, Northern Trust, and Orbitz; and served as a CTO and the head of cloud services.

Davinder had already become a regular speaker at meetups dealing with cloud and VR technologies. He has continued to leverage community and contacts to get speaker opportunities at conferences from Chicago to Singapore. He was looking for the right space in which to apply these technologies.

While renovating his kitchen, he found that consumers had to use clunky samples to try and visualize what retail products might look in different combinations. He saw the opportunity to use VR and AR technologies to improve the retail visualization and customer experience and founded Xent Studios in September 2017.

Performance and Trends

Xent Studios was incubated at the LatinX Incubator hosted at 1871, a Chicago-based coworking space and sponsored by the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce for 12 weeks starting September 2018. The program culminated in a pitch demo day, and Xent Studios’ pitch

The company recently showcased both Xentify VR and AR at the 2019 Kitchen & Bath Industry Show (KBIS) in Las Vegas from February 18 to 21, 2019.