Andreessen Horowitz – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

October 23, 2019

Sandbox VR Raises $11M Investment from Will Smith, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry & More

Sandbox VR, the location-based VR attraction, announced an additional $11 million in funding from some of the biggest household names in entertainment and investment.

Sandbox VR says in a press statement that their latest investment brings their total funds to $83 million, including the Series A round earlier this year that netted the company $68 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Alibaba, Floodgate Ventures, Stanford University, Triplepoint Capital, and CRCM.

The most recent funding round was led by David Sacks of Craft Ventures and the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund, with additional investors including Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, Will Smith, Honda Keisuke, Dreamers Fund, Michael Ovitz, and Kevin Durant & Rich Kleiman of Thirty Five Ventures.

“We believe that VR is finally ready to take off as a mass-market phenomenon in malls, where it can be optimized for a social experience,” said David Sacks, co-founder and general partner at Craft Ventures. “We chose the Sandbox team because of their background in game design; their VR experiences have a level of interactivity — with both the VR world and other players — that we couldn’t find elsewhere. We believe that Sandbox VR is poised to become the first VR experience for millions of consumers around the world.”

Sandbox VR Grows With Strategic Investors Including Will Smith And Katy Perry

Hong Kong-based company Sandbox VR added $11 million from an investment group including well-known celebrities.

The strategic funding from a16z and Craft Ventures brings the total raised by Sandbox from investors to $83 million, according to the company. This latest funding is led by David Sacks of Craft Ventures and the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund. Additional investors include Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, Will Smith, Kevin Durant with Thirty Five Ventures and the Dreamers Fund.

Hollywood Connections

The addition of celebrities to the investors backing Sandbox, with influence spanning popular music, film and sports, opens up the possibility of collaborations for the VR-focused entertainment company. In a call with Sandbox CEO Steve Zhao, he said he sees adding these individuals to the company’s investor list as potentially helping them with the development of future content.

“It just makes conversation much easier if they’re also an investor,” Zhao said.

Star Trek and PvP

Sandbox does full body tracking with haptic vests and accessories and they are preparing to open Star Trek Discovery: Away Mission and a new player-versus-player game called the Unbound Fighting League. Zhao says they have eight locations open now, both as franchises and Sandbox-operated spots, and they are planning to open eight more in the coming months. Sandbox offers mixed reality footage to guests as part of the standard package to commemorate the visit.

You can see UploadVR editor David Jagneaux in the video below kicking some of the simulated creatures coming toward him.

Finding Market Fit

The market for location-based VR entertainment remains experimental with both well-funded startups and mom and pop arcades exploring the draw of replacing reality for a little bit. A combination of fast-changing hardware, the cost of software development/licensing and the competing lure of low cost but high quality home entertainment means operators are faced with a lot of options on their path to paying rent and drawing in both new and repeat visitors. The VOID, Zero Latency, Dreamscape Immersive, and Spaces are just a few of the companies in the same area as Sandbox, each with their own approach to testing the market and seeing what works.

Earlier this year Sandbox announced its first major funding — $68 million –backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Zhao recounted his efforts starting in 2017 to find a market fit.

We’re hoping to test out Star Trek soon as well as the PvP game from Sandbox. We’ll report back with impressions as soon as we have them.

The post Sandbox VR Grows With Strategic Investors Including Will Smith And Katy Perry appeared first on UploadVR.

January 29, 2019

Location-based Entertainment Startup Sandbox VR Secures $68 Million Investment

Virtual reality (VR) location-based entertainment (LBE) can be a tricky business. Companies like The VOID and Zero Latency have seen success further expanding their global presence, while others such as IMAX VR have had to shutter operations. Sandbox VR, a Hong Kong-based provider also looks to be on the up and up, recently announcing a successful investment round securing $68 million USD.

Sandbox VR duo

The series A funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz reports Business Insider, with Mike Maples from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM, and Alibaba also participating.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Steve Zhao, Sandbox VR developed its own hardware and software solutions to create an out-of-home VR experience that can be fitted in shopping centres and other locations. “When we first opened in Hong Kong in 2017, when we opened the location, for the next 60 days we were sold out from morning until night,” Zhao said.

Since then Sandbox VR has managed to expand its presence to more locations in Asia as well as North America including Bangkok, Singapore, Los Angeles and San Francisco. With the new investment, the company plans further expansion, not only adding new locations but also developing new in-house experiences you can’t get anywhere else.

“We have locations planned for LA, Austin, New York, and Chicago, and we’ve inked multiple deals with Westfield malls across the country,” Zhao adds.

Sandbox VR - Amber Sky

Sandbox VR has a number of unique VR experiences for guests to try, including; The Curse of Davy Jones where players are on the hunt for the infamous treasure of Davy Jones, Deadwood Mansion, a survival title where players have to fend off the experiments inside and find a way out. And the most recent release, Amber Sky 2088. Set in a futuristic Hong Kong, players need to escort a mysterious package via a space elevator, saving humanity from an alien invasion.

You can book a Sandbox VR experience via its official website, with each booking accepting parties from 2 to 6 people, costing $40 per person. All the videogames are completely free-roaming, with players donning backpack PC’s and supplied with gun peripherals.

As Sandbox VR continues its expansion, VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest announcements.

January 29, 2019

Out-of-home VR Destination Sandbox VR Closes $68M Series A Financing

The big investment deals that brought so many VR companies into the limelight have cooled down somewhat over the past two years, although that hasn’t stopped the Hong Kong-born VR destination company Sandbox VR from landing a $68 million Series A funding round.

The financing round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley-based VC firm, and includes participation by Alibaba, Floodgate Ventures, Stanford University, Triplepoint Capital, and CRCM, Business Insider reports.

Unlike The Void, Sandbox VR hasn’t publicly announced any deals for branded VR experiences, instead making its own VR games including a futuristic shooter, a haunted house, and an underwater treasure hunting adventure. All of these support between two and six players at once, with the company charging around $40 per person for a 30-minute playsession.

The company’s approach is decidedly different from The Void, which features large-scale tracking volumes, interactive sets, and real-time effects. Instead, Sandbox VR is focusing on greater scalablity thanks to reduced complexity and physical footprint.

“We tried everything, what we really liked about [Sandbox] was that really though about archetyping this as modest-sized rooms that you could really put anywhere,” Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen tells TechCrunch. “So it’s this really scalable thing that you could imagine putting inside of a mall or a boutique retail location. You could scale a single location to having 10 or 20 rooms the way a movie theater might have 12 screens.”

Sandbox VR is currently operating seven locations across North America and Asia. More locations are planned for Los Angeles, Austin, New York, and Chicago. Sandbox VR founder Steve Zhao says the company has “inked multiple deals with Westfield malls across the country.”

The post Out-of-home VR Destination Sandbox VR Closes $68M Series A Financing appeared first on Road to VR.

May 31, 2017

Investing in Exponential Technologies with Andreessen Horowitz: VR, AI, & Drones

Kyle Russell is on the deal & research team for venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16z) where he’s focusing on investing in technologies ranging from virtual & augmented reality, artificial intelligence, drones, and other exponential technologies like quantum computing. A16z has invested in a number of prominent VR companies including Oculus, Magic Leap, Within, BigScreen as well as Lytro, & Improbable.

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I had a chance to catch up with Russell about how these exponential technologies are combining together in order to solve real problems. Russell used to write for TechCrunch, and so in order to keep up with the latest tech trends he’s become a power user of Twitter lists, subreddits like /r/MachineLearning, and an AI-research aggregator called the Arxiv Sanity Preserver. He also is tracking many different possible futures when it comes to emerging business models based upon the decentralized blockchain, self-sovereign identity initiatives such as the Decentralized Identity Foundation, as well as thoughts on the growing wealth disparity and blending of cooperative and competitive economic approaches.

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

The post Investing in Exponential Technologies with Andreessen Horowitz: VR, AI, & Drones appeared first on Road to VR.

February 24, 2017

Bigscreen Raises $3 Million To Succeed Where Envelop Failed

Startup Envelop VR raised around $5.5 million for its platform which promised to use VR to surround you in limitless windows. The company’s VR tech basically extended the Windows operating system so you could theoretically work with a number of apps spread around you in VR. Ultimately, the idea was that legacy apps could eventually use Envelop tools to extend into VR and use 3D space more effectively to display information.

We reported on the startup finally closing the funding round in January 2016. By January 2017, the startup had shut down.

The reason this bears repeating is that one of our favorite VR apps, Bigscreen, announced seed funding today to the tune of $3 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Bigscreen has a lot in common with that earlier startup in that it basically does the same thing as Envelop, Virtual Desktop and several other Windows extension apps — with one big caveat.

In Bigscreen, you’re not alone.