He founded a virtual reality lab in 1994, sold his next company to Intel, then built a platform for headsets that did not exist yet. When the Apple Vision Pro arrived, Quintar was already there.
There is a certain kind of founder who does not chase the market. They wait for it. Sankar Jayaram spent almost thirty years pointing at the same idea, that people should be able to feel present inside a place they are not standing in, and for most of that time the technology was nowhere close to catching up. Then, one winter, Apple shipped a headset, and the thing Jayaram had been building quietly for years was suddenly ready on the first morning.
Jayaram is the co-founder and CEO of Quintar, a company in Santa Clara, California that layers augmented reality over live sports. Hold a phone up at a golf tournament and you see the shot line drawn across the fairway, the yardage, the player's stats floating near the green. Watch a game at home and a basketball player's shot chart can appear on your coffee table. It reads like a demo reel. It is shipping product.
Before Quintar, before Intel, before the acquisition and the funding rounds, Jayaram was a professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University. He held the post for 22 years. In 1994 he founded the university's virtual reality lab, at a time when most people had never said the phrase out loud, focused on virtual assembly, prototyping, training and simulation. His research from that decade is still widely cited.
He did not do it alone. His longtime research partner is his wife, Uma Jayaram, and together they built the WSU Virtual Reality and Computer Integrated Manufacturing Lab. The two of them would go on to leave academia for California and start a company. It is one of the more durable co-founder arrangements in technology, a marriage that also happens to be a 25-year working partnership around a single stubborn question.
The Jayarams co-founded VOKE, a startup doing live virtual reality for sports and concerts. In 2016 it raised $12.5 million from backers including Intel Capital, the Sacramento Kings and A&E. That same year Intel acquired VOKE outright, folding it into what became Intel True VR and turning it into a foundation of the company's sports division. Jayaram stayed on as CTO of Intel Sports, driving the digitization and personalization of sports through immersive technology.
Then he did the harder thing. He left. In 2021 he and Jeff Jonas, a fellow former Intel Sports executive, spun out to launch Quintar, billed as the world's first AR-centered fan technology company for live sports. Selling to a giant and then walking away to start over is not the usual arc. Some people simply cannot stop building.
Most founders build for the platform winning right now. Jayaram built for the one coming later. Quintar's software was designed for spatial-computing headsets before those headsets were on sale, a bet that looked patient to the point of stubbornness until the moment it did not.
When the Apple Vision Pro arrived, Quintar's work powered PGA Tour Vision, among the sports apps featured at launch. The company had also become the PGA Tour's official mobile augmented reality developer. Being early is not the same as being wrong. It is just lonely for a while, and then, occasionally, it pays.
The technical trick underneath all of this is precision. To draw a shot line that sits exactly on the grass, or a stat that hangs over the right player, the system has to know where a venue is, and where you are inside it, to a far finer degree than a phone's GPS. Quintar built that with Google, adapting the ARCore platform.
The applications spread from there. In-venue, a fan could see a kicker's field-goal range painted onto the turf. At home, an NBA player's shot chart could sit on a tabletop. Navigation through a large stadium. Real-time data overlaid on the moment as it happens. It is a platform play, sold to leagues, venues and rights holders rather than shouted at consumers.
Quintar's funding has grown in steady rather than spectacular steps. Early backing came from SeventySix Capital, with participation from investors including Cowles Company and others. In 2024 the company closed a Series A led by Centre Court Capital, part of a round of roughly $8.2 million, and added Mustafa Ghouse to its board. Total funding sits near $11.2 million.
On the market itself, Jayaram is bullish in the way you would expect from someone who has spent a career waiting for it. He has pointed to the global extended reality market as a category expected to run well into the tens of billions of dollars, the tide he built his boat to catch.
Look at the resume as a straight line and it wanders. Professor. Lab founder. Startup CEO. Corporate CTO. Startup CEO again. Look at it as a mission and it never moves at all. From virtual assembly lines in the 1990s to virtual golf in the 2020s, Jayaram has been trying to put people inside a moment they are not physically in.
He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a credential that hints at the engineer underneath the founder. The pitch never needed a manifesto or a hype cycle. It just needed the hardware to show up, and enough patience to still be standing there when it did.