Peared
About
A VR technology startup founded by Rabbit Wilson that aimed to create the next big addiction in tech - "teleporting" people. A mix of AR and VR where one party could wear a VR headset and experience a rich 3D environment and take actions inside the environment that another (surrogate) wearing AR glasses in a real-world climate would get to replicate. The official tagline of the company is "Travel Together with Peared." The startup was funded by Rabbit Wilson's $14M loan from himself to the startup.
To get the startup off the ground, Rabbit Wilson self-funded it and re-connected with Kendra Godfrey, whose company, NAM, would help power the service. She also introduced Rabbit to Paolo Soto, who worked with her at NAM.
Three months after launch, Peared was up to five million users, and NAM had over forty people managing it. Six months later, Peared’s 25th million download happened, and 500,000 concurrent pairs of users had been served. Peared was now the number one app in eight different countries. Peared scavenger hunts were the hottest activity in India, Colombia, and the Philippines.
Soon after Peared's launch, competitors Rizon and Together announced their plans for competing services.
Media Blacklist
During the early stages of the company, the Peared team had learned that they were on a media blacklist and suspected former acquaintances to have played a role who were disgruntled.
Drowning Incident
A teenaged boy in Mumbai had drowned attempting to reach an island which his family claimed was due to a mission he was partaking in on Peared.
Acquisition Offers
After months of success post-launch, Peared received an acquisition offer by Thorn Capital that reached $350M. While financially, it was an excellent outcome for many early team members, Rabbit decided not to pursue these offers because ultimately, Thorn Capital wanted to run it entirely, and that's different from what Rabbit wanted. He wanted to run it how he saw fit and have it still be headquartered in LA, not move it to the Valley. His team felt different, they wanted the acquisition to go through.
Intellectual Property Theft
Together acquired Anslem Devices, a maker of VR technology for a surgical training program. Frank Meyers led the acquisition when he discovered that Peared was formed using intellectual property that was copied from Anslem Devices. After Together acquired the company, they sued Rabbit Wilson for intellectual property theft.
Centaur Operations
Unbeknownst to Peared, their technology partner NAM, used Peared's God Mode technology to run unsanctioned influence campaigns and other criminal acts. These were known as the Centaur Operations.