Our Story

Zachary Handshoe and Michael Butterfield met at ExxonMobil in 2020. Zach had just joined out of school, and Michael was already deep in the engineering trenches. They ended up on a four-person team building a data and prediction platform. It shipped, it worked, and it made the company more than $700M in under a year.

After that, Zach left to finish the startup he started before Exxon and quickly sold in in 2023 to OFFLOADIT.com. Not long after, he called Michael with the idea of going all in on spatial computing.

The team grew up during the early days of the VR industry and viewed the devices as novelty items over actual entertainment products. The tech was promising but the execution wasn't there. When Apple announced the Vision Pro, it marked a much needed re-focussing on what VR actually provides - experience. People do not want to play the same games they can on their PC or PlayStation. People put on a headset looking to EXPERIENCE memories and new moments. The challenge is the tech required to stream these experiences in real-time just isn't there. But if that can be figured out, so can a host of other live applications. After a summer of testing, SpatialGen was born.

Later that year, on a Bay Area trip, they locked in the direction for SpatialGen: make live immersive video and computer vision models actually usable. And when they can, help fund engineering education in rural America.

The vision caught the attention of Jason Calacanis, who decided to make SpatialGen his first ever investment in spatial computing.

Outside of SpatialGen, Zach will be modding video games and Michael might be running a puzzle night in Houston.