DreamVu began in 2015 inside the Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT) at IIIT Hyderabad, where Prof. Anoop Namboodiri, along with his graduate student Rajat Aggarwal and another fellow student, set out to solve a problem the imaging world considered impractical: capturing full 360° stereoscopic depth in a single shot, from a single sensor, without seams or occlusions. Their solution — a novel computational optics design — was published at CVPR 2016 in the paper "Panoramic Stereo Videos with a Single Camera." When Prof. Shmuel Peleg of Hebrew University, a pioneer of 360° 3D imaging, called the result remarkable, the team knew they had something worth building a company around.

DreamVu was founded later that year by four people; Rajat and Anoop stayed on to build the technology. In 2018, IIIT Hyderabad — which owned the foundational IP — granted DreamVu an exclusive license in exchange for equity.

What followed was nearly a decade of camera engineering. PAL, our first-generation 360° stereo sensor, went from lab prototype in 2016 to production in 2019 and is covered by ~16 patents spanning optics, electronics, software, and calibration. ALIA, our flagship omnidirectional stereo camera — entirely designed, built, and owned by DreamVu — was prototyped in 2017, entered production in 2020, and is protected by ~14 additional patents.

In October 2025, Sashi Reddi joined as Chairman, and the four of us — Sashi, Rajat, Anoop, and Parikshit — refounded the company as DreamVu.ai: a physical AI data infrastructure company that turns a decade of proven 360° stereo capture into the simulation-ready, dual-stream ego+exo datasets that humanoid robots and embodied AI need to learn the real world.