Happy third birthday, Blippar!

Three years since Blippar’s founding was marked yesterday (Sunday, 17 August 2014), and we’re all pretty proud when we look back and consider what we’ve achieved in such a short stretch of time.

A great deal has happened since Spring 2011, when Rish (our CEO) and Omar (our CTO) sat down over a pint in a pub in Cobham (England) and discussed making the Queen spring to life off a banknote using just a mobile phone.

The whole Blippar team in May 2014

Blippar co-founders now, from left, Rish Mitra, Jess Butcher, Steve Spencer, Omar Tayeb

Blippar co-founders three years ago, from left, Omar Tayeb, Jess Butcher, Rish Mitra, Steve Spencer

Within three years Blippar has accumulated a superb team and grown into the world’s largest augmented reality app platform with a singularly acquired audience, with over 50 million unique users (following our Layar acquisition) and 40 million+ global interactions.

What began with four people huddled around a desk in one small London office has ballooned into an international network of astounding teams across the globe.

As well as headquarters in London and New York, we now have outposts in San Francisco, Chicago, Delhi, Istanbul and Amsterdam.

In June 2014, we acquired Layar, a pioneer in the AR space since 2009. With this acquisition, Blippar has expanded its data footprint for consumer AR use, and can now effectively own the AR and visual browsing industry.

One of the first blipps ever built - for Puma in 2011

The London office undergoing reconstruction before Blippar moved in

Blippar celebrates one year in 2012

Since launching in 2011 Blippar has worked with over 5,000 brands and publishers, including some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, including Pepsi, Coca Cola, Condé Nast, TIME Inc., Procter & Gamble, Kraft, L’Oréal, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Jaguar, Hearst and many, many more.

Our logo now appears on over 1.5 billions SKUs and more than 10 million magazines and newspaper pages.

And if it only took us three years to do all that, just imagine what we’ll do with the next three…

This really is just the beginning of the story. Watch this space.