At the end of September, the decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project, Mawari Network, built on Solana, announced the completion of a $10.8 million strategic funding round. This round was led by Borderless Capital, 1kx, and Anfield LTD, with participation from Blockchange, Samsung Next, Draper Dragon, and Animoca Brands Japan, among others.

According to public information, Mawari Network was founded in 2017 and has an average annual revenue of $1.5 million. Over the past few years, the team has specialized in 3D content streaming, obtaining three patents and twelve more in the pipeline. So far, Mawari’s solutions have been deployed in over 40 projects worldwide, serving major clients such as KDDI, T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, BMW, and Netflix.

With impressive funding and understated yet powerful project capabilities, Mawari has emerged as a rising star in the DePIN space. This article comprehensively analyzes the project, covering its development history, team background, funding, core technology architecture, future prospects, and challenges.

What is Mawari?

Mawari is a Solana-based DePIN project focused on expanding spatial computing. Spatial computing blends the physical world with digital information, allowing users to interact with their surroundings through technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Extended Reality (XR). Imagine walking through a city where virtual characters and objects appear in real-time, seamlessly integrating with your environment—a fully immersive, location-based XR experience.

Source: Mawari

One of Mawari’s core missions is to provide real-time 3D content for VR, AR, and XR devices. By enabling faster and more resource-efficient 3D content rendering and streaming, it delivers users immersive, seamless, high-quality experiences. As the only full-stack spatial computing platform that optimizes decentralized computing and storage resources for AR/VR experiences, Mawari’s content distribution network relies on globally distributed GPU nodes. These nodes are strategically placed near end-users, significantly reducing latency and accelerating the delivery of 3D content. This makes efficient spatial content distribution and scaling possible to create a new digital world.

Mawari’s Development Journey

Although Mawari was founded in 2017, its inspiration came from the 2016 MUTEK Japan digital arts festival. At the event, Mawari’s founder, Luis Oscar Ramirez, recognized the vast potential of XR but also saw the many challenges artists faced in creating real-time, immersive content, such as data intensity, computing power, and scalability.

Ramirez established Mawari in 2017 to address these issues. However, the team faced a pivotal challenge in 2018. Japanese telecom giant KDDI requested proposals to stream its AI-powered digital human, Aiko, in full 3D to smart glasses at that time. Mawari overcame stiff competition from industry giants and successfully delivered the project. However, the team realized existing technologies couldn’t support the required scalability, and even hyperscalers like AWS could not meet their needs. This experience led to the development of the core technologies behind Mawari—the Mawari Engine and Spatial Streaming SDK—and the eventual launch of Mawari Network in 2022.

Source: Mawari

Despite encountering several challenges, Mawari’s vision and mission remained steadfast. The project’s founding principle is to transform “framed media” (content confined within screens) into “frameless media,” enabling seamless integration of virtual objects into the real world. Mawari strives to make 3D and spatial computing media accessible to everyone, shifting the interaction paradigm between the physical and digital worlds. This concept aligns with the meaning of the Japanese word Mawari—“your surroundings” or “looking around.”

Mawari Team Background and Funding

Mawari currently operates with a relatively small team of about 20 members, with plans to recruit additional staff in network engineering, business development, and marketing. The founder and CEO, Luis Oscar Ramirez, co-founded the Japanese edition of the MUTEK music festival and previously served as the Global Marketing Director at MUSIC Tribe.

Mawari has completed two funding rounds. In February 2023, it raised $6.5 million in a seed round led by Blockchange and Decasonic, with participation from Outlier Ventures, Primal Capital, and Abies Ventures. As mentioned earlier, the second round was a $10.8 million strategic investment. This round attracted notable angel investors, including Ivan Brightly, Joshua Frank, Pete Townsend, and Helium co-founder Sean Carey.

Mawari plans to use these funds primarily to maintain its technological edge and further develop its Spatial Streaming SDK, making it easier for developers to create seamless 3D experiences.

Core Technology Architecture of Mawari

By 2028, the global AR/VR user base is expected to reach 206 million. However, the rising demand for real-time 3D experiences brings significant challenges:

• High computational requirements: Delivering real-time 3D streaming requires powerful GPUs capable of dynamically rendering complex scenes.
• Low latency: Immersion is key to XR; even a few milliseconds of lag can disrupt the experience. To meet user expectations, ultra-low latency streaming is necessary globally.
• High costs: Traditional cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud charge significant fees for bandwidth and GPU usage, making scaling high-quality, interactive 3D content streaming costly.

In response, Mawari developed a new solution that offloads rendering tasks to a decentralized GPU network using DePIN. This decentralized infrastructure offers immersive, high-fidelity spatial computing with improved performance and interactivity. The benefits include:

• Fast and cost-efficient scaling: Mawari’s decentralized network supports real-time 3D streaming at a fraction of the cost of centralized cloud systems like AWS or Google Cloud.
• Overcoming bandwidth limitations: Instead of delivering fully rendered scenes, Mawari streams locally rendered object data to everyday devices, significantly reducing bandwidth use and enabling fast, responsive interactions for users worldwide.
• Guaranteed uptime: Mawari’s decentralized network mitigates the risk of single points of failure, ensuring continuous and reliable performance across global nodes.

The Mawari Network and the Spatial Streaming SDK are at the heart of this solution.

The Mawari Network is a goal-driven DePIN that uses GPU-powered nodes for real-time 3D content distribution and global scaling. Unlike traditional CDNs and cloud services, it distributes computational and storage resources across a decentralized network of nodes. The network also includes programmatic performance management and automated financial rewards to ensure fair node distribution.

The Mawari SDK simplifies 3D content development, helping developers and content creators integrate rendering and delivery into applications and spatial devices.

With robust tools, developers can use their existing workflows without learning new tools. Uploading content to the Mawari network works similarly to traditional 2D content delivery networks. The SDK supports real-time interactive graphics, cloud-rendering scalability, low-latency streaming, and compatibility with top XR platforms like Magic Leap 2, Quest, and Qualcomm® Snapdragon Spaces. It also integrates smoothly with major 3D engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.

Ecosystem Applications and Future Development

Mawari collaborates with artists, content creators, entrepreneurs, brands, and clients including KDDI, T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, BMW, and Netflix. The team also focuses on building a strong developer and creator community while helping partners implement effective monetization strategies. However, the project has yet to reveal detailed information about its tokenomics.

Mawari is steadily developing its testnet and aims to launch the mainnet in the first quarter of next year. In the fourth quarter of this year, Mawari plans to sell licenses for various nodes, including Spatial Streaming Nodes, Validator Nodes, and Application Nodes, further decentralizing and expanding its spatial computing network.

Mawari’s social media following and community engagement are limited to a few thousand users. To expand its reach, the company intends to enhance business development efforts, particularly in regions like Asia and the Americas, where demand for spatial computing is growing rapidly. This strategy aims to serve a broader community and user base.

Conclusion

Mawari focuses on real-time 3D content rendering and streaming, offering an innovative solution through its decentralized network and Spatial Streaming SDK. This approach aims for faster speeds, better scalability, and lower costs, unlocking fully immersive and seamless 3D experiences for users worldwide.

With years of product development and customer collaborations, Mawari has gained substantial experience in both technology and practical applications. However, the spatial computing market remains an open canvas—filled with vast growth potential and significant challenges. These include the high barriers to market education, low device adoption, lack of killer applications, concerns over data privacy and security, and the complexities driving technological innovation.

Overcoming these challenges will require collaboration across projects in the same space. Those who seize the opportunity and make early breakthroughs could redefine the future, setting the standard for decentralized spatial streaming and immersive content delivery.