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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VR and AR Firm Masters of Pie Announce Close of Funding Round

London-based technology firm Masters of Pie specialises in enterprise and manufacturing solutions using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology. The company has revealed that it has secured an investment round.

The investment has been led by venture capital firm Downing Ventures, which has meant Master of Pie were able to secure £1.6 million (GBP) in funding.

The firm uses a mixture of VR and AR technologies to allow industrial designers and production line experts to securely load 3D data into a virtual meeting space, allowing for remote collaboration between colleagues who might be thousands of miles apart.

Commenting on the funding and the next stage of growth for Masters of Pie, James Lewis, Investment Director at Downing Ventures, said: “The virtual reality market presents an exciting investment opportunity for us as venture capital investors, with the emerging sector predicted to grow from $4 billion in 2016 to nearly $80 billion by 2021. The adoption of both virtual reality and augmented reality also looks set to increase as headsets become less expensive and computing power gets faster.”

The Masters of Pie team intend to use the investment money to build on existing technology by investing in further research and development in order to further integrate collaborative communication tools into its existing VR platform. The firm is also planning to expand its development team and increase investment in sales and marketing.

Chief Executive Officer at Masters of Pie, Karl Maddix, added: “Having spent a number of years proving the technology, finding market traction and securing commercial partnerships, it is absolutely the right time now to focus on the rapid growth of the business. Downing has a deep understanding of how to build upon solid foundations to quickly scale up for market success. They share our vision and our passion and we are pleased to bring them on board at this key stage in our journey.”

Further news on developments within the immersive technology industry will continue to be covered here on VRFocus.