AuraPic is a location-native scavenger hunt platform. Creators drop photo "auras" at real places. Players physically travel there and align their camera to match — auraMode, our on-device vision engine, verifies the find even where GPS can't. Any street corner becomes a level.
Niantic proved demand: $6B+ lifetime revenue, 600M downloads — but the content is top-down and IP-gated. Geocaching proved longevity: 6M players, 3M hides, 20 years of retention — but the UX is stuck in 2005. AuraPic is the third act: creator-first, photo-native, sensor-precise. Anyone can author a hunt in 60 seconds. Anyone can play, anywhere, free.
Sub-meter GPS via multi-band GNSS, 9-axis IMUs, LiDAR in mid-tier phones, and on-device vision models make accurate photo-alignment feasible without a server round-trip.
Post-pandemic, Gen Z reports record loneliness alongside 7+ screen hours. "Touch grass" went from meme to movement. TikTok location challenges routinely pull 100M+ views.
The $250B creator economy is saturated online. Location is the one surface that can't be cloned, farmed, or AI-slopped. First-mover owns the map.
Every attempt since has been an IP skin or a dead relaunch. The category is frozen. Meanwhile the hardware, the behavior, and the creator economy all raced past it.
Pokémon GO, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Pikmin Bloom — all top-down. Players can't create. Content scarcity caps retention. When the studio slows, the map goes dark.
Text-coordinate UX, required membership for half of caches, no native photo primitive, no social graph. A 6M-user base that's aging out with no successor.
Snap, TikTok, Instagram lenses are filters — they live on a face, not a place. No persistence, no discovery, no "go find this."
Every DMO, museum, and mall operator is buying one-off AR activations from agencies at $50–500K per campaign. There's no platform. The spend is there; the rails aren't.
Authoring a hunt is as easy as posting to Instagram. Finding one feels like unlocking an achievement in the real world.
GPS gets you to the block — that's all we ask of it. auraMode's place-recognition net confirms the scene visually, even where satellites can't reach.
Raise the phone. The target photo overlays your live camera, and neural features bind your view to the aura's 3D anchor in real time.
auraMode solves your full 6-DoF camera pose — standing two meters left of the mark reads as offset even when the angles agree. Arrows walk you in; clear 90% and the frame locks gold.
Your find is minted with time, location, and your own photo — a proof-of-place artifact you can share.
Every aura is a photo plus a lightweight 3D anchor built from a two-second sweep. No rigs, no map editor. It's Instagram gameplay physics — one tap, one sweep.
Locking the optical FOV on capture and find keeps the pose math deterministic. No telephoto cheating, no wide-angle shortcuts.
Neural place recognition + feature matching + full 6-DoF pose solving in <80ms on A14-class silicon. GPS is a hint, not a gate. No server dependency, no PII leak, works offline.
AuraPic sits at the intersection of location-based gaming, the creator economy, and experiential tourism — and incumbents in each touch only a sliver of the others.
Devices with multi-band GNSS + 9-axis IMU + >=12MP cameras shipped 2022–2025. Every one is a potential client.
Eventbrite / Morgan Stanley: under-30 spending on tickets, tours, and "do-something" outings grew 23% YoY in 2024.
Even 1% capture of that audience is 6M players. Our content scales with users; theirs required a studio.
We're a freemium consumer app with an enterprise/geo-commerce option tacked on that doesn't fight the core loop — it feeds it.
Unlimited hunts authored, higher-rez photos, early access to brand drops, no ads, creator analytics. Target 6% conversion (Strava benchmark 5.5%, Duolingo 8%).
Tourism boards, museums, breweries, festivals pay to publish official hunts with analytics & redeemable rewards. $5K–$50K per campaign. Gross margin 80%+.
"Find this mural → 10% off at the café across the street." Location-triggered affiliate with attribution baked in. Rev share with local merchants.
Skinned capture frames, aura visual styles, limited drops. The Fortnite playbook, scoped to our visual identity.
Assumes 6% AuraPic+ conversion, ~$18 CAC on paid acquisition offset by ~40% organic from creator-driven virality. See appendix for sensitivity analysis.
Location apps die in thin air. Our launch strategy concentrates supply and demand in the same 5 sq km until the network lights up, then replicates.
Launch at 10 US universities with a student-ambassador program. Dense geography, native social graph, existing photo-share behavior. Goal: 30% campus penetration in 90 days.
Recruit 200 location-native creators (travel, urbex, street photography) with early access + rev-share on sponsored hunts. Their feeds are our acquisition channel.
Paid pilots with 3 DMOs (SF Travel, Visit Austin, NYC & Co) at $25K each. Official hunts act as tentpoles and generate press + case studies.
v0 alignment at <100ms validated the loop with 200 alpha users across 2 campuses — and surfaced the GPS-drift and lateral-offset gaps auraMode closes.
App Store launch in 5 US cities with auraMode as the default find engine. Creator program opens. Instrumentation for retention cohorts.
AuraPic+ turns on. First 3 sponsored city campaigns. Android GA.
2.5% D30 retention target (vs 1.2% casual-games median). $1.2M ARR run-rate.
Open the hunt-authoring API to third-party apps (tourism, education, enterprise training). Platform phase begins.
Every adjacent player either owns content (and gates it) or owns tools (and lacks content). We're the only one with a creator-first loop designed to compound.
| UGC-native | Photo alignment | Free to author | Social graph | Monetization rails | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AuraPic | Yes | Yes — auraMode, 6-DoF | Yes | Yes — native | 4 rails |
| Pokémon GO | No | No | N/A | Friends only | IAP + sponsors |
| Geocaching | Yes | No | Freemium | No | Subscription |
| Snap Lenses | Yes | Face/scene, not place | Yes | Yes | Ad revenue only |
| Randonautica | No | No | Yes | No | Ads |
| Niantic Lightship | Dev SDK | Yes | SDK only | No | Dev fees |
Each new creator adds hunts to their geography; each new player increases the density that keeps creators engaged. Classic two-sided marketplace flywheel, but the marketplace is the map.
Every successful find adds a posed, condition-tagged view to that aura's 3D anchor — auraMode literally matches better with use. Competitors would need millions of pose-tagged photos to catch up, and those only exist on our platform.
Over time we accrue the single largest registry of "game-able" locations on Earth. That dataset is licensable to tourism, gaming, AR, and ad-tech buyers in year 3+.
[Your name]
Previously [product / founding role]. Shipped [flagship product] to [scale]. Obsessed with the intersection of games, sensors, and the outdoors.
[TBD]
Target profile: ex-Niantic / Snap AR / Meta Reality Labs. Owns auraMode — on-device matching, pose solving, and place recognition.
[TBD]
Target profile: game feel + social UX. Has shipped a mobile consumer product to 1M+ DAU.
Advisors: [former Niantic exec], [mobile growth advisor], [tourism-tech operator]. Placeholder — finalize before founder meetings.
18-month runway to 100K MAU, $1M+ ARR run-rate, and a defensible creator network in 10 cities — Series A metrics on a consumer social timeline.
Runway
MAU milestone
Launch cities
ARR run-rate
Mitigation: auraMode makes vision the gate, not GPS — place recognition and 6-DoF pose verification need no satellite lock. Coordinates only shortlist nearby auras; finds verify even with zero GPS.
Mitigation: campus beachhead + paid "official hunt" seeding. A city reaches viable density at ~300 auras — achievable by 50 engaged creators in a weekend.
Mitigation: automatic geo-denylist (private property, hazards), human review queue on first publish, community flagging, insurance partner in place by public launch.
Mitigation: they've tried (Campfire, Lightship) and shipped developer SDKs, not consumer apps — organizational DNA is IP licensing. Speed + creator focus is our wedge.
AuraPic · Seed round · $3M at $15M post-money · Target close June 2026.