tonari

life-sized video portals: be together in-person, anywhere.

Productivity

Hardware

Tech

Our goal is to make tonari portals ubiquitous over time, and today we’re making two major product announcements that will help bring tonari to many more places: a free-standing option to enable fast and easy setup of tonari without construction; and location hopping for instantaneous travel between tonari portals. With tonari we’re attempting to solve the curse of distance: the fact that humans are built to be together, and yet we often live and work apart. Travel has gotten safer and faster, but is still costly, time-consuming, and stressful for our bodies and environment. Video calls offer convenience, but they don’t facilitate enough empathy, creativity, or trust. The idea for tonari portals — with their floor-to-ceiling size, ultra low latency, and natural eye-to-eye contact — is to make people in two locations feel like they’re really together in-person. We’ve engineered and refined our hardware and software from the ground up to be over 10-times faster and higher fidelity than all other video communications. We’ve also packaged everything into a seamless and elegant design that is natural and universal: tonari portals are as intuitive for toddlers and the elderly as they are for students, teachers, executives, and co-workers. tonari is already providing great value for many companies and organizations. Across Japan and Southeast Asia, businesses use tonari to overcome language and cultural barriers, and improve hiring and retention abroad. Startups in Japan, Europe, and the US are using portals to expand globally, access new markets and partners, and reduce business travel and emissions. Universities, incubators, and co-working spaces use tonari to strengthen communities, share more, and spark new collaboration. We'd love for you to celebrate these launches with us! Visit our freshly updated website for new videos and details about tonari.