Welcome to Tech In Chicago! 

Virtual Reality, the Future of Retail, & Selling to Big Business - Tracey Wiedmeyer / Co-Founder of InContext Solutions

Tracey & Colin

Tracey Wiedmeyer is the CTO and a Co-Founder of InContext Solutions, the leader in scalable virtual reality (VR) shopping and retail solutions. InContext Solutions lets manufacturers and retailers simulate real in-store shopping situations to ideate, evaluate and activate all types of merchandising, display, layout and other in-store shopping experiences within a VR store environment before implementing them in the real world. Just last month, they closed their Series E round of funding, bringing their total funding to $42.5M. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

  • Why Tracey and his co-founders started InContext Solutions
  • How he raised their seed capital from his family over Christmas
  • How similarly do people behave in virtual reality vs the real world
  • How InContext Solutions recreates stores
  • How they landed their first customers
  • How they try to lure tech talent away from quant trading
  • What he’d like to see big companies improve on
  • Why you have to focus on ROI and business cases when selling to large enterprises
  • Whether we are in a simulation or not
  • Where the future of virtual reality is heading in 5-10 years
  • What the future of retail may look like
  • How they landed a partnership with Intel
  • How a partnership with a big company can benefit a startup

Favorite Books:

Best Sources to Learn More About Virtual Reality:

Sponsored By:

  • Bevy: a Chicago startup delivering everything you need, but don’t want to own, for amazing experiences. Own Less. Live More. 

Solving Big Problems With Big Data - Dan Wagner / Founder of Civis Analytics

SpotHero's Mark Lawrence on Building a Marketplace Business, Meditation, & Why If It's Not a Fuck Yes, It's a Fuck No