'Osmo' Launches Play Revolution With $12 Million Funding And Apple Retail

Osmo

Today Osmo, the physical iPad add-on with educational games, announced Apple as a retail partner with the product now available for purchase. This, along with critical acclaim and $12 million in funding, set the scene for Osmo to go mass market.

The Series A Round funding was led by investor Accel Partners with other investors including Upfront Ventures and K9 Ventures. As part of the investment, Accel Partners' Rich Wong will join the company's board of directors. Accel Partners has invested in other companies now household names, Supercell, Rovio, Playfish, and SwiftKey to name a few.

'Osmo's technology makes childhood education more personal, creative and engaging. We believe that the future of education will rely on intuitive innovation that amplifies learning through interactive online-to-offline experiences - Osmo is at the forefront of this movement,' said Rich Wong, partner at Accel Partners. 'Osmo is a natural fit for parents and teachers because it adds a small but powerful layer of technology on top of a platform (the iPad) that children already know and love.'

This is rapid progress for the Tangible Play start-up that a year ago was, according to CEO Pramod Sharma, still '3D printing Osmo in [its] garage, iterating on jagged prototypes'.

If you haven't come across it yet, Osmo is the iPad app that offers educational games played by manipulating objects in front of the iPad's camera. It uses a mirror over the camera to skew gaze down to the action on the table and can instantly detect letters, shapes and in some cases children's drawings.

Sharma described the iterative development of the app, 'I have a five year old daughter who loves iPad, but I wanted to extend the iPad experience. We realized that the mirror was required to get the iPad to look at the table.'

The response has been impressive online, something reflected in the families I've tried the game out on - and occasions where I've used dinner party guests as guinea pigs. In fact such was the popularity of the beta program that stocks ran low almost instantly. Sharma assure me that they were ready for the demands of the launch, 'we are in pretty good shape now, it wasn't the case three months back. We've had to redo our supply chain but I'm pretty comfortable that we will be able to scale up.'

I asked about inspiration for Osmo and augmented reality competitors like Skylanders. 'I've seen the Skylanders experience and I feel there has been a lot of evolution of how the physical world can interact with a digital experience. I see Skylanders, Wii, Kinect as some steps and [Osmo] is expanding on that experience.'

Sharma talked about going further than the back and forth of toy figures or hands free interactions so that 'the boundary between real and digital will be come seamless so you don't see a separation, and so Skylanders has been an inspiration for what we have done.'

Achieving this is no easy thing for a small start-up company. To that end Osmo has achieved impressive support both in it's consumer base with more than $2 million in pre-sales since and the substantial venture capital backing announced today.

Osmo launches with three games to begin with, Words, Tangram and Newton. Of these the Words game is most accessible and popular in my family. At launch this offers more difficulty settings and the ability to set-up your own picture-word combinations via the myosmo website which will be very popular for school and educational uses. In fact Sharma confirmed that the app is already being used in over 2,000 schools.

I was also happy to hear that, unlike more commercial physical-virtual products (Angry Birds, Disney Infinity), Osmo intends to avoid allowing brands to leverage their experience for other purposes. This, along with the strong fit for schools, will certainly stand Osmo apart from similar experiences that families are used to.

I asked Sharma if he could talk about what new games are coming. With a chuckle he remained tight lipped. 'Every game we launch we do extensive testing with kids, we are exploring game ideas in art, education, math and creativity. We are exploring a lot of ideas in those areas.' The team working on those games has grown since Tangible Play started and now includes talent from Google , Stanford, Disney and other entertainment companies. 'We have there three or four different areas of expertise and bring them together to launch a new kind of play.'

Osmo will be available on iOS on 16th October, the physical component can also be purchased from the Osmo website.