Outlook is rosy for wine app founders
THE Geelong founders of augmented reality app Winerytale are in talks with potential investors from within the industry to help fund a worldwide rollout of the technology.
Winerytale is aiming to become the wine industry’s incumbent augmented reality app, creating a new vehicle for wineries around the world to connect with consumers.
Its aggressive capture-nowcommercialise-later launch strategy involves adding wine brands to the platform en masse and without approach.
After completing the addition of Australian wineries by the end of April, it intends to start loading content from more than 10,000 US wine brands to the platform, ready to be accessed within the app by July.
Using the Winerytale app, wine drinkers scan a wine label to launch the augmented reality feature, showcasing the wine’s backstory by projecting it from a virtual space in front of the bottle.
Ultimately, it will offer users the ability to connect directly with the winery for purchases or to make inquiries.
Founder Dave Chaffey said Winerytale was harnessing existing content for each winery and turning it into an augmented reality display.
“Wineries don’t have to do anything different, though they may wish to opt out, or add their own original content in the future,” Mr Chaffey said.
He said the company had developed an efficient process for adding content to its platform.
It recently opened a capital raising offer, releasing 10 parcels of shares with the aim of raising
$US1.25 million from investors by invitation. Mr Chaffey said initial talks with potential industry partners had been encouraging and he was aiming to complete the equity offer by the end of April.
After the US, Winerytale plans to keep rolling out the technology to English-speaking countries before undertaking a build of a translation service to provide the content to consumers in their native languages.
A digital marketing expert, Mr Chaffey and his son Luke launched the app, initially called Wine Tales, in April last year