The Arcturus Playbook: Building Infrastructure for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Building infrastructure for an emerging market requires a delicate balance between future vision and present reality. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Arcturus CTO Devin Horsman shared their approach to building foundational technology for volumetric video while creating immediate market value.

Starting with the Gap

Instead of building technology in search of a problem, Arcturus began by identifying a critical missing piece in the emerging spatial computing ecosystem. “It was clear that there were interesting folks that were working on the camera capture systems to record this kind of data, and that there were folks working on the display hardware,” Devin explains, “but nobody was addressing the sort of core pain point of compressing this really large data and transporting that data from the capture solution to the display devices.”

Finding Initial Value

This gap represented an immediate problem for existing players. “Nobody was addressing post production. So when you want to edit, combine, or in any way modify this captured data, it was something like having a camera or a digital camera without the JPEG or without Photoshop.” By focusing on this current pain point, Arcturus could create value even while building for a future market.

Targeting Early Adopters

Their initial go-to-market strategy focused on technically sophisticated early adopters. “These early capture stages had much more technical know-how and much more understanding of what our value prop was,” Devin notes. These early partnerships provided crucial validation while they built out their broader infrastructure.

Creating Present Value While Building for the Future

Rather than waiting for the market to mature, Arcturus identified specific use cases where their technology could provide immediate value: “Right now, that’s in marketing activations, that’s in online retail, like fashion retail primarily, and in the production of film and entertainment.”

The film industry provided a particularly compelling early use case. As Devin explains, productions are “basically looking to replace video virtually everywhere it exists today. So anywhere now that you see a flat recording from real life, we’re aiming for that to be a holographic recording.”

Maintaining the Long-term Vision

While serving current market needs, Arcturus keeps focused on their broader vision. “The future is going to look like people capturing these holograms or this volumetric video on their cell phone or with wearable headsets like AR glasses or other types of computing or pervasive computing devices you have around your house,” Devin predicts.

This vision extends to how we’ll consume content: “We want to be looking at things like broadcasting an entire sports stadium as a hologram. And maybe you watch that on your coffee table where everyone in your family or your family and friends can see.”

Measuring Progress

Their approach has driven significant growth, with a 150% increase in processing volume and 575% increase in end-viewer distribution over the past year. These metrics validate their strategy of building infrastructure while creating immediate value.

Key Lessons for Deep Tech Founders

Arcturus’s experience offers several crucial insights for founders building infrastructure for emerging markets:

1. Identify gaps in existing ecosystems that create immediate pain points
2. Find sophisticated early adopters who understand your vision
3. Create value in existing markets while building for future ones
4. Maintain a clear long-term vision while solving current problems
5. Focus on specific use cases where your technology provides clear benefits

The broader lesson is clear: building infrastructure for an emerging market doesn’t mean waiting for that market to mature. Success often depends on finding ways to create value today while building for tomorrow.