Gravity Jack Inc., a Spokane tech company that has been pioneering augmented reality since 2009, is raising funds in anticipation of developing an ambitious game that aims to combine AR with artificial intelligence, a language translation engine, and immersive gaming.

While Jennifer Richey, chief strategy officer, says Gravity Jack is profitable, with its agency and patent divisions generating $1 million to $2 million in annual revenue in recent years, the company is attempting to raise $1.25 million on the crowdfunding platform StartEngine for game development. It plans to follow that with a $5 million fundraising initiative via institutional investors.

“The game needs an influx of funds to execute,” she says.

The Journal last reported on Gravity Jack in 2015, when co-founder Luke Richey stepped down from the CEO position and retained his roles of president and chief visionary officer.

Luke Richey reprised his role as CEO in 2019.

Jennifer Richey, Luke's wife and another co-founder of the company, also has been with Gravity Jack since its inception.

She says Gravity Jack has generated over $22 million in revenue since inception and has a current valuation approaching $23 million.

Its agency division provides augmented reality products and services to many Fortune 500 companies and government entities. The company's client list includes Itron Inc., Ford Motor Co., Intel Corp., and NASA.

“Then we have our patent licensing that we’re earning revenues from right now,” she says of the company's second division.

The company claims it owns some of the fundamental patents in AR technology that were filed as early as 2009 and 2010. Gravity Jack licenses the patented technology to corporate users and intends to be aggressive in pursuing patent-infringement claims, Richey says.

Its third division is developing the game WarTribe of Binyamin, for which Gravity Jack has raised close to $300,000 on StartEngine so far. The company aims to launch its first viable version of WarTribe of Binyamin 12 to 18 months after reaching its crowdfunding and institutional investor fundraising goals, Richey says.

The game will be set in apocalyptic 2133. The tribe will be made up of players around the globe working together to fight an evil AI, Richey explains.

“Ours is an actual interactive augmented reality game,” she says. “The goal of the game is for all of us to take back the whole world.”

It will work with smart devices, including mixed-reality headsets just coming onto the market.

For example, Richey says, “You’ll hold up your device, and you’ll see a portal in the ceiling. It’s going to rip open, and things are going to come out of the portal that you have to grab.”

Gravity Jack intends to use one component of the game to develop natural language processing engines powered by AI.

She says over 7,100 languages are spoken around the globe, and major tech companies have AI translation engines for only about the top 100 languages, which are native languages for about half of the world population.

Gravity Jack wants to develop natural language processing engines for the remaining 7,000 languages “that big tech doesn’t really care about,” Richey says.

The game will credit translators of such languages with in-game currency that will have a mechanism for them to extract into their local currency, she says.

“It will actually be a new way of earning for them,” she says of local translators, many of whom likely will be living in impoverished countries. “It’s a value exchange. They’re helping us create this language engine.”

Gravity Jack then plans to create another revenue stream by providing translation services to companies and organizations to market in the native languages of the half of the world they may currently be unable to reach effectively.

The company is headquartered on the sixth floor of the Holley Mason Building, at 157 S. Howard, where Gravity Jack has leased 4,500 square feet of space since 2018.

“We made the commitment that we would be under one roof,” Richey says. “Then COVID hit, and we were remote for about a year.”

She says the team found it could work “pretty darn efficiently” while disbursed from the office.

“So we’re doing the fully remote thing,” she says. “We still have the lease on the space until October, but we started subletting it.”

The company has 19 employees, seven of whom are based in Spokane.

Richey says, however, once the WarTribe of Binyamin project is funded, the game team may have to come back to the office, “particularly in the beginning, when there’s a lot of creativity and ideation and needing to have the team physically together.”