ar investment – Page 3 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

June 24, 2020

Librestream Secures $24M Series D Funding to Expand Its AR-powered Worker Platform

Librestream, an enterprise-focused AR company, today announced it’s raised a $24 million Series D financing round. The Winnipeg, Canada-based company says the funds will be used to expand its ‘Augmented Worker’ services into Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

The Series D was led by Canadian Business Growth Fund (CBGF), and joined by Export Development Canada (EDC), Pender Technology Inflection Fund, Emerald Technology Ventures, and BDC Capital.

In addition to its expansion into new regions, the company says it will also be moving into the telehealth and retail fields, and hire 50 percent more staff over the next 24 months.

The company’s Onsight augmented worker platform is aiming to meet the needs of remote workforces by integrating smartglasses and AR headsets into industrial applications such as working on oil rigs, manufacturing floors, or aircraft hangars.

With Onsight, Librestream says workers can collaborate with remote experts, share live visuals, talk and view feedback onscreen, while freeing-up their hands for work.

“Librestream’s strong partnership over the past four years, and especially during this pandemic, proved invaluable in driving innovation within our processes and service delivery,” says Tina Bender, Manager Business systems & IT at Volvo Group. “The ability to remotely perform inspections has tremendous business impact from cost savings and productivity to improved customer service.”

Founded in 2003, the company’s Series D brings its overall financing to over $55 million, with its penultimate round arriving in mid-2016.

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April 30, 2020

Mojo Vision Raises an Additional $51M to Fund Smart Contact Lens Development

Mojo Vision announced it has raised more than $51 million in a Series B-1 investment round, something the company says will be used for further development on Mojo Lens, its smart contact lens.

The company’s latest funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, and includes participation by Gradient Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Struck Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Fusion Fund, Intellectus Partners, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, Numbase Group, InFocus Capital Partners, and others.

Dr. Greg Papadopoulos, PhD, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, will join Mojo Vision’s board of directors.

The latest funding round brings Mojo Vision’s total funding to more than $159 million, with its penultimate round to date netting the company $58 million in March 2019.

Back at CES 2020 in January, Mojo announced that it was building its smart contact lens with built-in display, Mojo Lens. Although the company admitted then that it was still years away from commercialization for consumers, Mojo is first planning to use its contacts for the visually impaired. Applications include real-time contrast and scene enhancement, something the company says will make navigation, obstacle avoidance, and personal interactions easier for the visually impaired.

“The unveiling of the details of our product development earlier this year has generated increased excitement and momentum around the potential of Mojo Lens,” said Mojo Vision CEO and co-founder Drew Perkins. “This new round of funding brings more support and capital from strategic investors and companies to help us continue our breakthrough technology development. It gets us closer to bringing the benefits of Mojo Lens to people with vision impairments, to enterprises and eventually, consumers.”

The smart contact lens is still in development, however Fast Company reported in January that Mojo Lens squeezes 70,000 pixels into less than half a millimeter, a green monochrome microLED served up directly to the eye’s fovea. Although it’s not an augmented reality system as such, the company seems to be making serious inroads to creating a truly wearable heads-up display (HUD), similar to Google Glass in function as opposed to an AR headset such as Microsoft’s HoloLens.

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April 22, 2020

XRHealth Secures $7M Investment to Expand Its AR/VR Telehealth Platform

XRHealth, a Boston-based medical company, today announced that it’s raised $7 million in funding to expand its telehealth platform targeted at VR headset users.

The company announced the funding via a press statement today, stating that the new funding round was led by Bridges Israel, Flint Capital, and 20/20 HealthCare Partners.

According to CrunchBase, this brings the company’s overall funding to $15 million, with its latest seed round secured in late 2018.

“We are excited to join XRHealth which offers a comprehensive VR-based telehealth platform for healthcare providers, allowing them to treat patients both in clinics and at patients’ homes, making therapy continuous and efficient. This is a win-win solution for both care providers and its recipients, that became extremely relevant nowadays, as patients can get effective treatment without leaving their homes,” says Sergey Gribov, Partner at Flint Capital.

XRHealth creates applications to provide remote care to patients throughout the United States, something that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has underlined as a clear area of importance.

The company provides a number of applications created for various use cases, including virtual support groups, stress management, chronic pain management, and memory decline. Additionally, the company is sourcing licensed clinicians to conduct therapy sessions using VR applications, and says its telehealth programs are covered by most major health insurance companies as well as medicare.

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April 20, 2020

Waveguide Maker DigiLens Secures Additional Investment by Samsung Ventures

DigiLens, the Silicon Valley-based waveguide maker, today announced that Samsung’s venture capital group Samsung Ventures is increasing its stake in the company.

At the time of this writing, neither firm has detailed the extent of the investment, stating simply that Samsung Ventures is again investing through a convertible debt instrument.

DigiLens most recently closed its Series C financing back in May 2019 to the tune of $50 million, which saw Samsung Ventures join alongside UDC Ventures, Niantic, Continental AG, Sony Innovation Fund, and Diamond Edge Ventures, the VC arm of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation as investors.

As a developer of waveguide displays and laser waveguide-based light engines, DigiLens aims to make cost-effective components for AR headsets, something it hopes to do at a consumer price point in the future.

The company touts its ability to create waveguide displays that are “smaller, thinner and lighter than conventional optics and light engines, and far cheaper to mass produce.”

Although the company is eyeing consumer AR, DigiLens has also integrated its technology into heads-up displays (HUDs) for a number of industries including automobiles, avionics, retail and architecture.

“Samsung Ventures is a partner who fully understands all the different challenges of the XR ecosystem. Optics are by far the hardest element of the next platform – especially when it comes to packaging them at an affordable price point and sleek form factor that will attract mass adoption,” said Chris Pickett, DigiLens CEO. “XR devices simply can’t work without a compelling optical solution – they are the window into augmenting the world with digital content and we believe DigiLens’ light engine and waveguide solution will finally bring quality optics to the market. We’re hugely proud of our ecosystem of licensed manufacturers, software partners and OEM investors who continue to support us in this mission.”

Outside of today’s investment, DigiLens has secured $110 million since it was founded in 2003.

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April 6, 2020May 15, 2020

Apple Confirms Acquisition of VR Live Streaming Company NextVR

NextVR, the live event broadcasting platform for VR headsets, has been acquired by Apple in what was reportedly a $100 million purchase.

Update (March 15th, 2020): For the first time since reports broke back in April, Apple has confirmed that it was the buyer of the VR live streaming company NextVR, Bloomberg reports. Apple did not confirm the price of the acquisition, but earlier reports suggested $100 million.

This week NextVR’s website was stripped down leaving only a short message in its wake: “NextVR is Heading in a New Direction. Thank you to our partners and fans around the world for the role you played in building this awesome platform for sports, music and entertainment experiences in Virtual Reality.”

Original Article (April 6th, 2020): Founded in 2009, the Orange County-based startup broadcasts stereoscopic video of live sports and music to a wide swath of VR headsets, including Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, PSVR, and PC VR headsets such as HTC Vive and Oculus Rift S. Its unique selling proposition has always been its ability to let fans get close to the action in a way traditional monoscopic livestreams simply can’t, i.e. by letting VR users watch live events from the best seat in the house.

The company has come a long ways since it initially launched the platform on Samsung Gear VR in 2015, amassing over 40 patents and strategic broadcasting partnerships with the likes of the NBA, NHL, WWE, FOX Sports, Live Nation, and the International Champions Cup, and significantly upping its video quality in the process. The company has also previously sets its sights on six degrees of freedom-enabled volumetric video, higher resolution output, and augmented reality support.

According to CrunchBase, the company’s total funding comes to $115.5 million, with its latest investment, a Series B round amounting to $80 million, arriving in August 2016.

The acquisition is said to follow the company’s failure to secure a Series C round in early 2019, which coincided with a layoff of 40% of its staff.

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February 3, 2020

Masters of Pie Secures $4.7M to Further Develop AR/VR Tools for Enterprise

Masters of Pie, an enterprise-focused AR/VR studio, announced its secured £3.6 million (~$4.7 million), something the company says will help double its development team and add support for cloud streaming and IoT data to its flagship product, Radical SDK.

The funding round was led by Foresight Williams with participation from Downing Ventures, Bosch Ventures and existing angel investors. According to Crunchbase, the latest round brings Masters of Pie’s total funding to £5.2 million (~$6.8 million).

Founded in 2011 in London, Masters of Pie started out as a service company creating R&D prototypes and products for blue chip companies using the tools and knowledge from the gaming industry.

The studio later honed in on virtual reality with the release of the Oculus Rift DK1 back in 2013, although it wasn’t until 2016 that the studio stopped taking service-based work and consolidated its effort into a new enterprise-focused platform, Radical SDK, which is aimed at helping companies collaborate on live ‘heavy’ 3D data sets in AR and VR.

“Our ambition was for a scalable product which would change the way enterprise as a whole collaborates,” founder and CEO Karl Maddix says in a press statement. “This led us to change tactics and build out Radical from the ground up as an SDK that we could license to larger, more established software providers who already sold en masse to our target customer base, but lacked the ability to easily add this new real time support natively to their own software platforms due to technical debt.”

With the investment, the studio says it will also expand its business into industries such as architecture, engineering, construction, healthcare and the energy sector.

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January 31, 2020

Social AR/VR Workspace ‘Spatial’ Secures $14M Series A Financing

Spatial, a New York-based startup behind the eponymous real-time AR/VR collaboration platform, has secured $14 million in additional financing, bringing its overall funds to $22 million.

The latest funding round was led by White Star Capital, iNovia and Kakao Ventures, with continued participation from Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Zynga founder Mark Pincus. Existing Spatial investors also include the likes of Samsung NEXT, Baidu Ventures, and LG Ventures to name a few.

Founded in 2016 by Anand Agarawala and Jinha Lee, the company’s social AR/VR workspace has since gone on to include support for Microsoft HoloLens 2, Oculus Quest, Magic Leap 1, Qualcomm XR2, Android/iPhone mobile device and traditional monitors.

The company emphasizes the platform’s potential to let knowledge workers seamlessly connect through virtual spaces, thereby replacing the need to travel for meetings and collaborations. Users can chat using more lifelike avatars built through a quick 3D scanning process, open browser windows, and view and manipulate 3D objects as if they were in the same room together.

We had a chance to go hands-on at MWC 2019 last year, and again at CES 2020 earlier this month. Spatial has made a compelling argument for its workspace tech, and while it’s equally early days for the company and augmented reality, it’s clear Spatial is headed in an inevitable direction.

Check out the on-stage demo from MWC 2019 last year to get a better idea of what Spatial is all about:

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January 9, 2020

CREAL Picks up $7.4 Million in Funding for Its Light-field Tech

When we caught up with CREAL and its light-field tech at CES 2020 this week, the founders also filled us in on the latest happenings with the company, including the closure of a recent funding round which, between investments and grants, brought in $7.4 million.

CREAL is building a novel light-field display for AR and VR headsets which promises to make virtual imagery more natural by more accurately modeling the way that light from the real world actually interacts with the human eye. At CES 2020 this week we saw the latest progress the company has made toward shrinking its hulking prototype down to size.

CREAL’s latest light-field prototype | Photo by Road to VR

We also learned that, as of last month, the company quietly secured an additional ~$7.4 million in funding to continue development of the tech.

The bulk of the funding comes from a Series A financing round in which CREAL raised 4.3 million CHF (~$4.41 million). The round was led co-led by Swiss investment firms Investiere and DAA Capital Partners, with participation by tech entrepreneur Ariel Luedi and existing investors from SICTIC.

CREAL also picked up 2.5 million CHF ($2.56 million) as a grant from the European Innovation Council, and another 500K CHF ($514K) as a subsidized loan from the Fondation pour l’Innovation Technologique.

As a ‘deep tech’ startup working on a technology as intangible and difficult to explain as light-fields, it’s impressive that CREAL has managed to convince investors of the value of its tech. The new funding will greatly extend the CREAL’s runway.

At CES 2020 this week, CREAL founders told Road to VR that the company doesn’t intend to create or market a light-field headset itself. Instead it plans to be a creator and licenser of the technology, and work with partners who want to use the tech in their own headsets. CREAL says it’s already sending development kits to select partners which are interested in the light-field display.

A mockup of CREAL’s target form-factor | Photo by Road to VR

Following the static-mounted demo we saw at CES 2020 this week, CREAL believes that it will have its first head-mounted prototype working within the next six months. The goal is to bring the tech down to size, first to fit into VR headsets, and then eventually AR glasses.

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September 25, 2019

Backed by $4.4M in Funding, Devs Behind ‘Job Simulator’ & ‘Fantastic Contraption’ Announce New XR Startup

Developers behind critically acclaimed VR games Job Simulator (2016) and Fantastic Contraption (2016) today announced they’re founding a new studio dubbed Absurd Joy. To give them a big push along their quest to “invent entirely new ways to interact, play, and experience immersive technology,” the company today announced it’s raised $4.4 million in funding.

The new studio (stylized as absurd:joy) was founded by Alex Schwartz and Cy Wise—both formerly of Owlchemy Labs—and joined by Andy Moore of Radial Games as a core team member.

Absurd Joy says its working directly with Valve and Oculus, and is being supported financially by Ed Fries of 1Up Ventures, WXR Fund, and Jaroslav Beck of Beat Games.

As its advisors, the studio counts Patrick Curry of FarBridge, Anna Sweet, and Chet Faliszek from Stray Bombay.

Schwartz, Wise, & Moore – Images courtesy Absurd Joy

Schwartz and Wise, the former CEO and studio director at Owlchemy Labs respectively, developed Job Simulator and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) before its acquisition by Google in May 2017. Schwartz and Wise left Owlchemy in June 2018 to “pursue new opportunities.”

Moore, a 20-year industry veteran, is known for his programming and design work on Fantastic Contraption and The Museum of Other Realities (theMOR).

Absurd Joy hasn’t unveiled a project yet, and says that the process of experimenting and honing new interactions will be made public in some sense.

“The plan is to post GIFs, experiments, stories, videos, examples, and other random peeks into our process. It’s wacky, we know. But secrets are dumb anyway,” the studio explains.

Although there’s nothing to show today, Absurd Joy has outlined a few principles it wants to follow in its future experimentations, namely making AR/VR interactions more naturalistic and not forcing people to learn ad hoc concepts like unnatural gestures, making it fun, and breaking from the mould of using AR/VR as a games-only medium.

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September 19, 2019

Applications for Vive X, HTC’s AR/VR Startup Accelerator, Close September 30th

The application deadline for HTC’s VR startup accelerator program is coming up quickly on September 30th. Now in its fifth batch of investments, the Vive X accelerator aims to help grow the global AR/VR ecosystem by providing tools, expertise, and investment to startups.

After kicking off in 2016, the Vive X accelerator now has presence in Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East, boasting hubs in Beijing, London, San Francisco, Taipei, Shenzhen, and Tel Aviv. HTC claims to have $100 million earmarked for investment in AR and VR startups through the accelerator.

On August 6th, Vive X opened applications through its website for its fifth and latest batch of startups; applications close on September 30th.

The accelerator is open to developers working in nearly every facet of the AR/VR industry, including entertainment, gaming, health, education, virtual commerce, hardware, media, and VR theme parks.

HTC has thus far invested in and mentored more than 100 AR/VR startups, with companies to its name such as the brain-computer interface startup Neurable, South Korean haptic wearable creators bHaptics, and mixed reality software startup LIV.

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