By Brian Rinker  – Reporter, San Francisco Business Times
Dec 23, 2019 (bizjournals.com)

When sisters Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram first co-founded their augmented reality gaming startup, Krikey, they worked out of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Marina District and lived in the apartment next door.

Over the following year or so, they pumped out dozens of games and virtual objects, mainly animals like humpback whales, lions and manta rays. But as their staff grew from two to eight employees, the once-cozy apartment eventually became cramped and untenable.

“At the peak I think we had about 10 people in there,” said Jhanvi Shriram, CEO of Krikey, who at 31 is the older sister.

“That’s when we had to move,” added Ketaki Shriram, the 28-year-old CTO. As sisters who work and live together, they often finish each other’s sentences.

Today, nearly three years after they founded Krikey in January 2017, the sisters work in a legitimate office building in the Financial District, employ 30 full-time and part-time employees and have their sights set on a Series A funding round sometime in 2020. The fast-growing company, which launched their app on iOS and Android in October 2018, has also homed in on the type of gaming product they want to build: location-based augmented reality games that encourage animal conservatorship.

Augmented reality is layering digital objects over physical reality. Virtual reality, on the other hand, is 100% virtual.

The company’s flagship game is Wingspan, a map-based birdwatching game that is sponsored by the National Audubon Society and based off a board game with the same name. Krikey’s Wingspan is basically Google maps with virtual objects layered on top. Game players walk around town in real life following the map on their phones looking to spot virtual birds, which react when players get closer.

The other top game they offer is Gorillas!, developed in partnership with Ellen DeGeneres’ The Ellen Fund, which lets you track gorillas in Rwanda.

Since launching Wingspan in February 2018, Krikey’s user retention rates have doubled, with gamers in more than a 120 countries. Krikey wouldn’t disclose its users numbers, but would say that its app has seven times year-over-year user growth.

They are hoping their games encourage users to care more about animals and the natural environment. Two studies out of Stanford — one about cutting down a tree and the other about the death of coral in the ocean — found that after people experienced these events in virtual reality, they immediately cared more about the fate of coral and trees, even reducing their paper towel usage. While this hasn’t been studied in augmented reality, the sisters are hoping their games leave a lasting impression of animal conservatorship.

“We’re trying to see if we can take these findings that have worked with virtual reality and apply them potentially at scale to bring positive impacts to people’s lives in a much larger way because everyone has a mobile phone,” Ketaki said.

The sisters, who were raised in Saratoga, founded Krikey when they were both going to Stanford University. Jhanvi, who had earned her undergraduate degree at Stanford, returned after some years in Los Angeles to get her M.B.A. Ketaki had been at Stanford the entire time Jhanvi was away working toward a PhD on how immersive virtual experiences affected people at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Coincidentally, the sisters graduated each of their programs in the same year. Somewhere in that time frame they even made a documentary on Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs.

Like many founders, they weren’t exactly sure what their product would be at first, but they knew they wanted to create a company that dealt with Ketaki’s research: how immersive virtual experiences could affect people and change behaviors. But virtual reality is a hard business to break into because it’s costly and competitive. Plus, virtual reality requires expensive headsets. So, the sisters shifted to augmented reality, which they saw as a much more accessible technology because everyone has a cell phone.

One of the advantages of being sister co-founders who live and work together is that they are very candid with one another, so when a problem arises they can get to the heart of it quickly, they said, even if they don’t always see eye to eye.

“Yes of course we disagree, but I mean at the end of the day it’s like we’re together for life right like this is your family,” said Ketaki.

“I like to joke that I recruited her at birth,” Jhanvi added.