Sector 5 Digital handout
Jeff Meisner
The Glimpse Group, a leader in the virtual reality and augmented reality platform industry, has agreed in principle to purchase Sector 5 Digital, an award-winning immersive technology company based in Fort Worth, officials from both companies confirmed on this week.
Sector 5 Digital will remain in Fort Worth as a subsidiary of The Glimpse Group, co-founder and CEO Jeff Meisner said. Branding, too, will remain unchanged.
Terms of the deal were undisclosed.
“This allows us to grow,” said Meisner, who will continue as Sector 5’s general manager and join Glimpse’s executive team as Chief Revenue Officer. “One of the limiting factors in our growth has been access to development in programming resources. By joining resources with Glimpse, we have access to 100 additional developers and programmers. That allows us to continue to scale. Secondly, it gives us access to certain technology we haven’t had ourselves. Some of the technology is really remarkable.”
Meisner will also be appointed to Glimpse’s board of directors as a non-independent director, adding “significant immersive technology industry experience,” Glimpse said.
Sector 5 launched in 2014 under Meisner and partner Doug Fidler.
The acquisition of Sector 5 aligns with Glimpse’s objective to become a premier software and services company in the emerging VR/AR industry, “with a global footprint,” said Glimpse CEO Lyron Bentovim, who added that the merger has the “potential to be transformative.”
“As the metaverse takes form and we seek to become an enabling infrastructure provider in its development, having scale in size, operations, technologies, and capabilities is paramount,” Bentovim said.
“We saw an opportunity to build scale in an industry that doesn’t have scale. And from my perspective, I’m not only getting a really good business, but a really good business partner to grow Glimpse together.”
Meisner and Bentovim both said talks about an acquisition started a few years ago.
Sector 5 works with companies to enhance their brands with digital content for marketing, communications, sales, entertainment, visualization, and simulation. The company has an in-house studio developing immersive experiences through VR, AR, 3D modeling and animation, film and video production, and interactive game technology.
Sector 5 used the pandemic to innovate. With live, experiential events canceled, the company pivoted with an “aggressive R&D effort” to develop a platform for immersive content experiences through a browser link.
S5D Rush was born.
“It’s VR through a browser,” Meisner said.
In seven years in business, the company never raised outside capital.
Said Meisner: “I firmly believe that this is an opportunity where the whole is much greater than the sum of parts and I’m very excited for continued success within the Glimpse ecosystem, especially as the evolution of metaverse accelerates.”