#StartupsEverywhere profile: Rishi Ranjan, Founder & CEO, GridRaster
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Enabling the Next Generation of Augmented & Virtual Reality Through Cloud Computing
Rishi Ranjan is a co-founder and the CEO of GridRaster, a startup providing the underlying infrastructure needed to support immersive augmented, virtual, and mixed-reality experiences on mobile devices and in the enterprise market. We spoke with Rishi to learn about his path to launching this cloud-based XR platform, his experience navigating the patent and immigration systems, and his goals for GridRaster going forward.
Could you tell us a little bit about your background and how it led you to GridRaster?
I was born and raised in India and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) before earning my Master’s of Science at Georgia Tech. After college, I went to work for Qualcomm, Broadcom, and then a startup in the Bay Area. I founded GridRaster in 2014, along with two others who still are a part of the company today. All of us wanted to work on the next generation of mobile experiences—we wanted to make possible the types of mobile experiences that would be coming in five or 10 years.
GridRaster’s cloud-based technology provides the underlying computing and network stack to power immersive mixed-reality experiences on mobile platforms. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) presented some of the first major use cases for our technology. For example, current batteries are too heavy for people to wear on their heads—at least for most applications—so there was always a push for smaller and smaller batteries. But the next generation of mobile experiences is also reaching towards infinite processing power. That creates a tension, though, because you cannot keep reducing your battery and keep increasing the processing power, right? These types of experiences also have very tight latency requirements, but no one was viewing this as a problem because people were thinking about how iPhones have become so powerful. In reality, a gaming PC can do so much more than an iPhone, and the AR we are looking at has nearly 100,000 more tasks to accomplish. We knew that to enable the next generation of VR and AR experiences, we needed to move to the cloud.
We initially looked at releasing our tech in consumer markets, but we also knew that consumers would take time to adjust to new technology. Instead, we have focused on the enterprise market for a better product-market fit. The defense, aerospace, and automotive industries are ready to start rolling out AR and VR on a massive scale, to facilitate, e.g., product design and engineering, maintenance, training, and real-world simulations. We think that the company will remain focused on enterprise solutions for the next couple of years, and then look for adjacent verticals where we can solve more problems.
GridRaster has filed a number of patents. What has that experience been like both here in the U.S. and internationally?
At prior jobs, my co-founder and I filed patents. We never had difficulty, even with international patents, because large companies have a lot of money to devote to the process. When we filed patents before, we did not have as much visibility into the process or the costs. We just provided all the documents and the company would go and file patents wherever the company operated. The resources were not an issue, but now at a startup it can become a major issue for us.
Right now, we are only operating in the U.S., but we know that we will expand to Japan and Europe because they are big manufacturing hubs. We file patents in the U.S., and while our lawyers suggest we think about filing in other places, that would significantly increase our workload and financial burden. That has forced us into tough decisions like choosing not to file a patent in China because China is not yet a viable market for us. If that market suddenly turns around and we start selling there, we won't have patent protection yet. Overall, as a startup founder, it can feel like international patent systems are very much geared towards large corporations that have a lot of resources. It is easier for them to navigate, while the increased workload and costs associated with international filing can be too much for innovative startups to endure.
On the other hand, it can be relatively easier to file a U.S. patent, and we can be confident that it will be protected by the court system. So far, we have filed six patents with GridRaster, and have successfully relied on these patents. I would say that the U.S. patent system has done very well. Given that most companies are international, we are constantly making the tradeoff between filing patents in other countries or saving money. Those are the decisions where we see problems.
Have you faced any sort of challenges with the immigration system or bringing more people on board?
When we started the company, two of our co-founders were on H-1B visas and could not quit their jobs. It was very difficult at that time because we did not have enough funds to prove to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that GridRaster could pay wages. Luckily, Unshackled Ventures provided the funding we needed. Without them, my other co-founders would not have been able to quit their jobs and start GridRaster. It's very difficult to launch a company, but if you have to try and do it while you're also working for a large company, that puts you under a lot of pressure.
When I was at Broadcom, I hired four employees with Ph.D.’s from UC Davis. They were eligible for Optional Practical Training (OPT) visas and we trained them for three years, but we could not get them H-1B visas. They ended up leaving the company because our only option was to send them back to China to work, but they wanted to stay in the U.S. so they went back to school instead. It was challenging because these were focused, highly skilled workers, which are very hard to find, and we lost all of them at once.
We are seeing the same challenges with GridRaster because we do cutting-edge research on computer vision, deep learning, AR, and VR. We have some very good talent, but we have not been able to secure H-1B visas for everyone. One of our employees has an M.S. and is critical to our research and development efforts, but their OPT visa expires early next year. We are extremely worried that we will not be able to keep that person on board. We could open an office outside of the U.S. but these team members don't want to leave because they have great opportunities here—that's why people come. A lot of our customers are in defense or aerospace, so apart from hurting the company, this challenge also hurts the country that we serve. We train these people, who spend five or 10 years earning a Ph.D., and then we lose them.
When I started my first job at Qualcomm, they were very aggressive about filing for a green card and I was able to get permanent residency extremely fast. My other co-founder joined a different company that was not as aggressive in filing, so after 20 years he still doesn't have a green card. He’s a critical part of our team and we are always worried that one day he might have to leave the country. The ability of many immigrants to stay in the U.S. really depends on a company's resources. It's a huge struggle for people who are trying to really contribute, especially to startups.
What sort of challenges do you foresee in the next five or 10 years? What are your goals moving forward with GridRaster?
We are very aggressively trying to mitigate individual contributor risk away from the company, but that will take another two to four years. We are hopeful that before anyone faces something like an immigration challenge, our individual risk will be completely removed. My co-founders and I have already handed over a large part of our responsibilities to people who can really drive our company forward. That is our best hope because if one of our team members has to leave the U.S., it will be a very big disruption. We don't even know how we would survive that because each individual team member plays a very important role in GridRaster. The other co-founders and I are now diversifying our hiring practices and giving up some responsibilities slowly. That’s our most immediate concern.
Our goal is to become the cloud platform for AR and VR. The way we look at cloud applications is really going to change because up until now, we have been deploying a monolithic application. In the future, everything will be part of the cloud. The whole cloud paradigm will see a complete shift, and the open-source world has created a lot of tools that can enable this shift. Kubernetes is a great example of how open source technology is changing the way we think about the cloud. At GridRaster, we are trying to become the default cloud provider for this new paradigm. We call it cloud-native AR/VR, which is basically a new way of thinking about the cloud. If you think about an application that goes into the cloud, there are a lot of inefficiencies so it will take five to 10 years to see real-world applications for our technology. We are seeing a lot of traction and solid customer use cases already. As we invest in the company, we have the chance to provide customers with immense value and hopefully go public so we can keep providing the best product services for our customers.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email ian@engine.is.
