On this episode of Industry Focus, host Jason Moser sits down with Lyron Bentovim, co-founder and CEO of The Glimpse Group. Tune in as they talk about the company's unique strategy, how augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are being used across industries, and what the deal is with the metaverse.
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This video was recorded on Oct. 13, 2021.
Jason Moser: It's Wednesday, October 13th, I'm your host, Jason Moser. On today's Wildcard Wednesday show, we're talking more about investing in immersive technology with a special guest. Lyron Bentovim is a co-founder and the CEO of the Glimpse Group, a virtual reality and augment reality platform company. Recently, I had the good fortune to chat with Mr. Bentovim about the company's unique strategy, how AR and VR are being used across the industries, and why the metaverse is probably a bigger deal than you think it is. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Lyron, thanks so much for taking the time to join us this week. The Glimpse Group, to me, is a fascinating company because it presents a publicly traded company that I think represents one of the more attractive ways to invest in the immersive technology space. The Glimpse Group is essentially a collection of a lot of little companies in the immersive technology space. But I wanted to give you a chance. Tell us a little bit about the Glimpse Group and what you all are doing there.
Lyron Bentovim: As you mentioned, the Glimpse Group is a platform company for virtual reality and augmented reality enterprise-focused company. Each one of our companies has their own area of focus, their own technology, their own industry, or use case that they're focusing on. They all work together as part of the Glimpse family. What is really powerful about Glimpse from an internal perspective is their ecosystem. It is the fact that our companies work with each other, they share know-how technology, IP, go-to-market strategies, and work just like a founder. Every one of them helps each other out where they can, they all benefit when they all succeed, and that's the real power internally. When I look externally from an investor perspective and I've been an investor all my life, including many years professionally, Glimpse has diversified way of playing this emerging sector. Instead of betting on one company or one stuff industry, you're actually getting an exposure to the industry as a whole. That has continued to grow both organically as our company is executing and growing. But in regards to you as we're adding additional pieces that are missing in our puzzle, and you as an investor will get access to all of that in a corporate structure.
Jason Moser: That's interesting. One thing I was curious about and I think you really answered it there was, to me it struck me there was the potential at least for some network effects there. The companies working together, it can all help each other succeed, bringing more success into the network then breeds new ideas and therefore more success. I think that's really fascinating aspect to the company. I want to go back just a second, your professional investing background. That's interesting to me as well. Could you expand on that a little bit?
Lyron Bentovim: For about seven years, I founded and run a hedge fund focusing on small-cap technology companies. I've seen this from the other side, and always looked when they're interesting opportunities, how do you play that trend just like you are looking at the immersive technologies. When I founded Glimpse was with the intent of providing exactly that solution. Because I saw this industry and where it was going when we started Glimpse in 2016, and I knew there will be a need for a company like us in the public market.
Jason Moser: I love that, you're investing background really helping dictate what I think is an excellent strategy. Immersive technology, it's so cool and there's so many neat applications yet it is still so nascent, it's still developing in one of the issues I've had, not an issue really, but just something I've noticed is that just so many of these great ideas out there, there's still so small. They're uninvestable essentially because they're not publicly traded companies. They're uninvestable for our purposes. In the Glimpse Group certainly presents the opportunity to get exposure to those businesses. In speaking of those businesses, I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about at least a couple of them because they think, now, if I'm not mistaken, you have nine wholly owned businesses underneath your umbrella.
Lyron Bentovim: We have 10.
Jason Moser: 10 now? Great. Well, I wonder if you could go into a couple of those businesses and what they're doing.
Lyron Bentovim: I can do that, I wish I can talk about that. That will take longer than I think, so just to give the diversity of what we're doing. I'll start with one of our hottest company, Kreyol. Kreyol is obviously making lifelike 3D assets, either using photogrammetry or using artists, and those are used in a variety of different ways on marketing and branding. Both directly with brand as well as through agencies, or through social media. One of the biggest partnerships is snap, or they're working with them on a lot of the advanced lenses, which is really a way of getting augmented reality right now as we all wait the augmented reality glasses that hopefully Apple one day will deliver to us in a real way. But right now to get augmented reality, you are doing it mostly on phones and tablets, and they're leading the front, and basically bringing live real-looking objects into that and creatively using those to tell a branding or marketing story. That's just one end. Then just to go on the other side. On the virtual reality side, Adept Reality, which is our learning and training company, does both corporate training and works on the learning side with a lot of universities, really pushing the ability to add another layer to how you're teaching students. If you look at what you can do right now, obviously, for years, it's only been in-person with some remotes.
Obviously over the pandemic Zoom has taken hold as another way of doing classes. But one of the things you are missing in both of those is the ability to use tools that are not available where they are so we can build see relations. Let's say you want to have audit class, talking about how to do warehouse inspection. You can't take the students to the warehouse even in good days, and talking about a warehouse inspection doesn't really get them to the point where they can work for an audit firm and perform that. What we've built in partnership with Nova University in Florida is a training simulation for warehouse inspection. The students go into VR guided by the professor. They go in and they have to perform the inspection as a team in virtual reality, and they can all be in different locations using the headsets that go in, do the inspection, we get analytics on how well they did. They can give feedback. It's just an amazing learning experience.
Jason Moser: With 10 companies today. I mean, it's worth noting. I mean, the Glimpse Group, you're a young business, still a relatively small business in the market capitalization of sub-100 million, which I mean from the one perspective, that's small, but from the other perspective if you look at anything, well man, there's a ton of growth potential there. With 10 wholly owned businesses today, what's the strategy there, I mean, how many companies do you envision owning at some point with the Glimpse Group?
Lyron Bentovim: I think the sweet spot is for 15-20 companies. But as you bring companies in, one of the things we can do is then flip pieces together and bring pieces into it, so we make additional acquisitions that will fit into companies we already have that are doing things in that business, and those samples the consolidations we've done historically, so over the [inaudible 00:08:23] we've actually had 13 different companies that either we acquired or more often some of them we merged together were if the pieces may fit together and we thought that would be the right way of restructuring, somewhere they didn't really turn out, we just obviously consolidated the pieces into the existing Glimpse companies and moved away from that part of the business. I think 15-20 as you look at different industries that we still don't have a lot of exposure to, that we want to get into would be the right number. Then, we'll continue to grow both organically, averaging just under 100 percent growth annually over the last few years, and inorganically as well.
Jason Moser: How hands-on of a CEO are you? In other words, with the companies that the Glimpse Group owns, do you prefer the acquisition of businesses with their leadership and letting them go do their thing, or do you play a role in the development and the strategy for each of those businesses?
Lyron Bentovim: I let them do their thing. But I see myself as Chairman of the Board, the general managers, which is what we call the people running their companies, they're on their own companies, their business. I want them to own it. We do not acquire companies if the management team is not staying and continuing to run it because of the early nature, they are passionate about what they're doing. We're letting them do what they are good at, which is envision their products, build their product, take it to market. Those are the things that every entrepreneur wants to do and that's why they are in business. We take care of all the overheads stuff is done by Glimpse. I serve as their strategic advisor in the essence, helping them figure out where they want to go, open doors for them, be a sailing board for them. But I'm not trying to micromanage their companies.
Jason Moser: Understood. When you look at the Glimpse Group today, when you look at glimpse of where you are, the size of the company, the annual revenue there, obviously plenty of potential. What growth expectations do you have for this business?
Lyron Bentovim: I think the business can realistically grow or more than double, definitely with an inorganic element year-over-year and as the industry grows and the industry has been growing around 40-50 percent annually over the last few years. We've been doubling the industry growth organically. We can do even more than that inorganically obviously and really start getting to scale or scale doesn't exist in this industry. If you look at VRAR right now, there's no scale. Most of the companies competing with our subsidiaries are venture by Seadrill and Cirrus around type companies. We make scale, or scale doesn't exist. As we continue to consolidate this industry, our vision is to become the premier software and services company focused on enterprise in this industry.
Jason Moser: Is that the focus of the business primarily to software and services side, not so much the hardware side?
Lyron Bentovim: Yeah. We do not do a hardware, never say never, but hardware is a capital-intensive business right now, and as we look at tech cycle than we're very early still in this immersive technology cycle, hardware is leading the effort. Right now, all of the doors going to this industry are in hardware. You've got companies like Facebook and Microsoft, and Apple and Samsung, and HTC and on and on that are investing real significant dollars. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars each into R and D and almost all of that is hardware and operating systems that are surrounding the hardware. That's great because we see those are partners for us. They are making this industry happening. But the second half of the cycle is, if you look back to the tech cycle of the '80s to the mid-2000s. When you look at the beginning, all the leaders were hardware companies, HP and Compaq and BlackBerry and Cisco. Those we're the leaders. The second half of the cycle, the leaders were the software companies. The Googles and Facebook, and Amazon and, and those are the winners in the second half of the cycle. You couldn't build those businesses in the first half cycle because there's nothing to do, you can't have from Amazon or Netflix if there's no infrastructure for that. Investment was done initially on the hardware in these cases, the phones and tablets and computers and how they evolve from the early models to where they were and infrastructure done all the work at Cisco and the likes have done on the infrastructure side to build the network to allow this to happen. Then once that happens, the world became a software, the hardware companies that were well managed are still players, but they're not the big names that everyone's talking about. Nobody is talking too much about Hp or Cisco into CRO of what was ruling that technology world we're talking about the software companies. I think this cycle will have the same elements and we're positioning ourselves to be one of the software companies. Again, Glimpse as a collection is a different model, but we hope that some of our companies will be leaders in their spaces and Glimpse as a collective will be leader in the industry as a whole.
Jason Moser: Let's talk a little bit about a subject that's getting I think a lot more airtime these days is certainly being mentioned more and more in the conversation with immersive technology and that is the Metaverse. I think it's a fascinating concept in theory. I think there's still a healthy dose of skepticism out there as to whether it actually really can or should exist. I personally I'm not one of those skeptics, I think I see it already existing today and I absolutely believe it's going to be something that becomes more and more a part of folks lives who choose to be a part of it. But let's talk a little bit about the Metaverse. First and foremost, just give your definition or your vision of what the Metaverse actually is.
Lyron Bentovim: That's a good topic and the Metaverse will happen. I go back to the previous cycle and to answer the first question. The Metaverse is basically the 3D internet. That's my definition of it. If you go back to when technology started, people have software. That software was separated, was sitting initially on an individual computer and then on localized servers. The internet really took all of these online presence and put them in one place and connected them in a way that you can just go from one to the other without any limitations. That's what browsers basically is. Right now when you look at the immersive worlds, you have VR and R experiences that are happening, are remote basis. Some of them are social in a sense but multiple people can be in the same one, but they're all silent. You cannot physically going from one experience to the other, you can't go from Roblox to Facebook's community, keeping yourself as yourself and just move from one to the other and take benefit of whatever you can do in each one of them. Each one of those are right now siloed environment. What is going to happen and then more and more experiences will happen. Initially, they'll all be siloed. You can build a vehicle commerce experience where our brand decides that they want to sell their merchandise. In virtual reality, you can create a store, and people will download the app and go into that store and they can do anything in there. When you move into the Metaverse, all of these will be combined.
You will be able to go in there and move between all these worlds as yourself in either one alter mode or multiple variations of alter mode, but you can make a journey between them and they will basically become a 3D internet where there will be a world and interesting question is whether it should have a linear map like world or like the Internet, which doesn't really have a map and you can just hop from one place to the other, but they don't exist in a map, multiple version that you can walk from one side to the other but having that ability to be presence in immersive worldwide make it easier for us as human to have it linear and hot-swapping being one geography, there's a lot of interesting questions about it. But the magnitude of that power of taking to and just using the example of basically a two-dimensional world, which is the internet imagined a three-by-three and then adding the third dimension, which is where the immersive world braze in and now you're multiplying it by three and now you're getting from nine to 27. That's a big deal and that's the power of where the Metaverse is going to go.
Jason Moser: I love that definition. I think that simplifies it but makes it very understandable for folks who are trying to connect the dots, the 3D Internet. I've never heard us describe that way and I absolutely love it. I guess what it makes me wonder is, do you feel like the Metaverse is going to be optional? Is it going to be something that as a consumer, as an individual, I can choose to participate it, or is it going to be something that as hardware continues to develop, as technology continues to develop, is it going to become something that is more or less just ingrained as a part of our lives? Can I just choose not to participate or is it going to be something? [OVERLAPPING]
Lyron Bentovim: I usually see people that choose not to participate in E-commerce and just going to a store. Some people even don't go to stores and they just basically grow their own food. The Metaverse is going to be, and it's not happening next week. It's not happening next year. It's going to take a few years to get there. But the Metaverse will be as internal to our account lives even more than what the internet is worth now and we're all constantly connected to that. Yes, there's some people that decided not to, some due to religious reason sometimes for just they don't want that life. But almost everybody is connected right now. The whole world is connected. But I think what will happen with the Metaverse is the whole world will be connected in a much more physical way with each other. You'll be able to meet and hang out with people from all over the world where right now you can do this video call and you and l could be sitting many milestones each other, but we still don't have that presence that we're together. In the Metaverse, we can just go anywhere and we can go visit anywhere. It will change the world of travel. Travel will be much more an element of traveling places in the Metaverse, than traveling to places in the real world. It will change the future of the office. We will all be working in virtual reality. Right now it's hard to imagine you don't want to sit with the headset on 15 hours and do your work and you rather hit the community rather than do that. But that's going to change and will not be Zoom where you have a few meetings and everybody's working on themselves, people will be working in virtual offices. There will be going out there and chatting with people with meetings and you'll have that whole experience of being in an office, but you will not need to commute to it and you can work from anywhere which will open up the ability of people to be where they want to be lifestyle-wise and still be part of whatever company and have that corporate culture.
Jason Moser: That is a fascinating future to think about. I know you said it's still a few years away, but really it's just around the corner, it's already happening and it really sounds like your company there, the Golan's group is going to be key in making that happen. We're excited to follow you along and see how the business grows. He's the President, he's the CEO of the Glimpse Group. Mr. Bentovim, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
Lyron Bentovim: My pleasure.
Jason Moser: That will do it for us this week, folks. You can learn more about the Glimpse Group by going to the Glimpsegroup.com. Remember you can always reach out to us on Twitter at MFindustryFocus or drop us an email at [email protected]. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against so buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Thanks as always, to Tim Sparks for putting the show together for us. I'm Jason Moser, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.
