HelioRender launches photoreal AR SDK and raises $27M

Tech · 4 min read

HelioRender launched HelioAR, an SDK that brings real-time relighting, physically based materials, and environment-adaptive shadows to mobile AR experiences. The company claims the SDK significantly improves photo realism while keeping CPU and GPU usage within mobile budgets.

Alongside the launch, HelioRender raised $27 million in a round led by True Ventures to optimize mobile inference pipelines and expand engine plugins for ARKit, ARCore, and Unity. The SDK supports automatic environment capture and material auto-tuning from a single phone photo.

Early adopters include retail AR apps and virtual try-on vendors that benefit from more believable lighting and material responses. HelioRender also announced a cloud fallback for older devices that offloads heavy computations to remote render servers.