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Rebuilding the road to the internet. Our investment in SigmaOSOur investment in Pixaera

Rebuilding the road to the internet. Our investment in SigmaOS

November 16, 2022

Three decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee created WorldWideWeb, the first public road to the internet. For the first time, text docs were linked over a public network — a web as we have come to call it — and accessible to all who could get a hold of a NeXT computer. While WorldWideWeb did not come without its limitations, it shone an exceptionally bright light on the potential of an open internet. Seamless global communication and unrestricted access of the world’s information.New entrants in the browser space followed, and in 1993, Mosaic was born. Mosaic was GUI-based, easy-to-use and ran on Windows, giving anyone with a PC access to web pages, chat rooms and image libraries. It was the killer application for the internet. It felt magical.Behind Mosaic were Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen — the Andreessen now notable for co-founding a16z. The two saw the opportunity in capitalising on the emerging web, and a year later, released Netscape Navigator, an improved version of Mosaic. Needless to say, it took off. By 1995, over 15m people were plugged into the web with Netscape controlling 70% of the growing browser market. A mere 16 months post launch, Netscape went public at a valuation north of $2.9bn, making it the largest tech IPO at the time. The idea that money could be made on the back of the internet became widespread and the browser wars commenced.What followed was intense competition:Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and quickly gained market dominance after bundling it into its Windows OS in 1997
Netscape died out but the company’s codebase was open sourced and resurrected as Firefox under the non-for-profit Mozilla
Apple entered the market via Safari in 2003, while Google launched Chrome in 2008. Many others gave it a go.
Internet adoption skyrocketed to the billions, while market shares fluctuated. Browsers became commoditised. What started off as a space rooted in innovation, turned to be one infamous for its incremental innovation cycles. Soaring global demand for internet access meant browsers doubled down on user acquisition, not on product differentiation. Distribution became the goal. The end result was complacency — players failed to evolve in line with changing user needs.They say a picture tells a 1000 words. Well, here are three:Internet Explorer in 2000 looked no different to Netscape Navigator in ’97, which honestly does not look too different to Chrome today. Sure, underlying performance has gotten better, UI has gotten cleaner, extensions are now a thing… but the fundamentals have persisted.Thirty years since Tim Berners-Lee’s release of WorldWideWeb, browsers’ core utility remains to be predominately search. Meanwhile, the world has moved on. The internet has strayed from its hypertext roots and now consists of an endless ocean of interactive experiences. Software, as we very well know, has moved to the cloud. We work, socialise, play, create, learn etc all inside of our browser. It has become our digital home — an OS within an OS.Average time spent per day on the internet is now more than six hours. Given eight hours of sleep, we are talking close to 40% of our waking hours spent on the web. For 16–24 year olds the figure is well over seven hours… and growing. The net net is that our web browsers are the single piece of software we use most — they are our gateway to all that we do online.Ironically though, we do no think of them proactively. We have come to accept browsers as they are, despite their many shortcomings. As designed today, browsers leave us buried in a sea of tabs and web apps, constantly losing context, always a click away from distraction. They provide their core utility without offering much more. They are what they are because no one has challenged them to be better… until today.Enter SigmaOS, a company looking to end the widespread complacency in the category. SigmaOS is rethinking the browser experience from first principles, designing every millimetre of the product with genuine empathy for the end user. The company is building a new type of web browser, one that makes you faster and more productive. One that tailors itself to your needs. One designed for the 21st century.It is keyboard powered, supports powerful contextual search, enables easy, split-screen multitasking, turns tabs into organised workspaces, offers cross-device syncing, delivers performance and security on par with Safari, and is beautifully designed. SigmaOS personalises itself to the user, it puts content front and centre, it brings order to chaos… it just works.Behind the magic are Mahyad, Ali and Saurav, three software engineers with a deep appreciation for the art of product design. The trio deeply believes in building opinionated software. Buttons need a purpose, features need a reason to exist. Nothing should be implemented for the sake of it. Where many other players over-index on shipping as many features as they can, Mahyad, Ali and Saurav believe in the philosophy of less is more. They build what needs to exist, not nice-to-haves. Every incremental feature released on SigmaOS has a reason to be there — to make browsing the web wonderfully productive.Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are partnering with the three of them on their journey to rebuild the road to the internet, a browser for the 21st century. We are incredibly excited to be leading SigmaOS’ Seed round alongside a phenomenal group of investors, including Moonfire, Shine VC, TrueSight Ventures, 7Percent, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, Ventures Together and others.

Our investment in Pixaera

October 27, 2022

Ask anyone who has grown up playing video games what their most profound memories are and certain game moments will likely make the cut. For me:Driving into Liberty City for the first time in Grand Theft Auto 3
Playing out The Battle of Normandy in Call of Duty 2
Riding into Mexico in Read Dead Redemption
Exiting Vault 101 in Fallout 3
These moments largely defined my childhood. They immersed me to such an extent, that I vividly remember them to this day, as though I have just experienced them. Liberty City may be a fictional city, the Battle of Normandy may have taken place decades ago… but it sure feels like I have been to both. This is precisely what makes games so powerful — they teleport you. They make the unreal feel real.When designed well, games are undeniably one of the most effective mediums for storytelling. They enable the player to actively partake in the narrative, and by doing so, retain so much of the experience… namely the emotions felt and the lessons learnt.At their core, games are also incredibly well suited for teaching. Game designers have to ensure that players learn a game’s mechanics at the right pace in order to limit player frustration and churn. If a game is too hard, too soon, players will hit a wall and leave. If a game is too easy and does not get progressively more challenging, players will get bored. In many ways, this is no different to traditional education. You are unlikely to enjoy jumping into Calculus before tackling Algebra. The bottom line is that designing balanced progression experiences is mission critical to unlocking player engagement. This is a universal truth in the industry — one that is widespread and very well understood.Tying the above together, it is hard not to see gaming as a deeply powerful medium for education. The immersiveness of play translates to high knowledge retention, while balanced progression mechanics mean high learner engagement. And yet, it feels to us as though the video game industry has largely neglected the education use case. Incumbent players are almost exclusively focused on entertainment… perhaps unsurprisingly though, given things seem to be going pretty well. In 2021, the games industry generated well over $200bn in sales, with recent forecasts indicating that the figure will most certainly surpass $300bn by 2026.At LocalGlobe, however, we have long believed that gaming will extend far beyond entertainment and increasingly intersect with a growing list of verticals, from finance and fitness to social and yes, also education. This is not a particularly new view for us and dates back to our investments in Robinhood and Codecademy, both of which revolutionised their respective fields through gamification. Years since we made those investments, the opportunity feels more immediate than ever. Graphics have become life-like, while the cost of developing high-end, interactive experiences has fallen significantly thanks to game engines such as Unity and Unreal. One has to ask: why gamify an experience, when you can now build a full out AAA game around it? To us, this is where the world is heading.The university cases studies of the near future will be experienced through simulations, not taught via text or lectures, while corporate training will be played out by workers, not learnt via antiquated videos. Games will undoubtedly democratise procedural learning. People will play for fun but they will also play to learn. Game studios will start serving enterprise customers, not just end-consumers. We will all learn by doing.This is where Pixaera comes in, a company on a mission to make this very vision a reality. To put it simply, Pixaera is a game platform for the professional world, built on the premise that the future of corporate training should be engaging, empowering and fun. The company believes that immersive learning is the answer and should be the go-to way people learn most new skills.For context, research indicates that immersive learning vastly outperforms traditional teaching methods by an order of magnitude. Average knowledge retention in a classroom after a week is 20%. Meanwhile, knowledge retention via experiential learning is 70–90%. Unfortunately though, scaling experiential teaching is incredibly hard today. Real-life training requires equipment, supervision, often large physical spaces and the need to travel. It is simply too expensive to deploy. Pixaera removes those barriers altogether, delivering high quality, cross-platform training experiences, at scale through play. It is a AAA gaming platform designed for enterprises, not a training product wrapped inside a game engine. Watch below to see what we mean:And while it is clear to us that Pixaera’s products will be needed across industries and corporate functions, the business is laser focused on solving a very immediate use case today — health and safety training. To shed some light on the magnitude of the problem, the world sees over 370m occupational accidents every year, 2.78m of which result in deaths. The byproduct of these accidents is a 4% hit to the world’s annual GDP, roughly $3.2 trillion in losses. By replacing antiquated training methods with high-end, immersive experiences, Pixaera has the potential to A) massively reduce workplace accidents, and thereby, save lives and B) prevent tens, if not hundreds of billions worth of unnecessary damages.What underpins the company’s motive to start off by tackling health and safety training comes directly from its founder’s past. Mousa, who is a life-long gamer, previously led the supply chain team for one of BP’s major rig operations in the Northern part of Iraq. It was there where he witnessed a work-related death for the first time, one that could have unfortunately been prevented given proper training. The accident meant a life gone and millions in losses due to halted production. Sadly, this is not a one-off for the industry.As such, it comes as no surprise that Pixaera’s first major customers include a roster of oil & gas multinationals, from BP and Shell to General Electric and FieldCore. Given the regulatory nature of the industry, worker safety training has to be conducted annually. This means that recurring usage is baked in via the law and for good reason. It is deeply important. And for an industry that sits at the very top of the ‘highest polluting’ list, immersive training also means reduced reliance on travel for worker training. That is a win-win.Longer term, we see Pixaera extending its tentacles everywhere… from manufacturing, construction and inspection training to leadership and mental health. You name it. And while the business currently develops content in-house, on behalf of customers, albeit very quickly, it is on a mission to build out its own development platform — one not too dissimilar to a Roblox Studio. This will enable any organisation, topic expert or third-party services provider to easily design, deploy and monetise their own highly unique immersive training experience. It is fair to say, this is a future we are pretty damn excited about.Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are partnering with Mousa and the entire Pixaera team to deliver on this vision. We are deeply excited to be leading the company’s Seed round alongside existing investors York IE, the founders of FACEIT and renewable energy co ERM.