vr investment – Page 13 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

February 24, 2017

‘Bigscreen’ Social VR Desktop App Raises $3 Million Seed Investment Led VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz

Bigscreen Inc, the company behind the social VR desktop app, Bigscreen, last year told us they’d raised a seed round from “Tier 1” VC firms. Today the company has announced details of that round and where they’re heading next.

Bigscreen is simple but powerful. It puts you in a virtual space with your own computer desktop floating in front of you. You can use the screen exactly like you use your normal desktop monitor, with all of your own apps—be it for gaming, watching movies, browsing the web, etc. The kicker is that, because you’re in VR, anyone else can join in the virtual space and bring their desktop too. That makes anything from watching a movie or gaming alongside a friend to having a collaborative business meeting as easy as jumping into the same virtual room together.

The beauty of it all is having access to the massive breadth of existing PC applications, without having to wait for special VR versions of apps like web browsers or word processors to appear. As Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar puts it:

“2D content isn’t going anywhere. Microsoft Word won’t be text flying around you in 3D space. Flat content like movies and videogames won’t suddenly disappear or get replaced by 360 videos and VR games.”

This simple but powerful concept attracted the attention of leading firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most active investors in the VC space, with participation in some of tech investment’s most notable names like AirBnB, Pinterest, Skype, Twitter, and more, including VR/AR investments in companies like Magic Leap, Oculus, and Within.

Bigscreen says that Andreessen Horowitz led the $3 million seed round closed last year, which also had participation by True Ventures, Presence Capital, Ludlow Ventures, David Bettner, and SV Angel. Bigscreen Inc CEO Darshan Shankar says, “we did our investment pitches in virtual reality, using Bigscreen to close the round!”

“These are early days in VR and AR, and we’re here for the long run,” he wrote in the announcement this morning. “This funding will allow us to accelerate our development plan and pursue our long-term vision. We’re taking a disciplined and lean approach by building a small core team.”

AR Specialist Zappar Nets $3.75m in Funding, Aims to “Democratize Augmented Reality”

Zappar, a London-based developer in the Augmented Reality space, is announcing the closing of its Series A funding round. The $3.75m investment will accelerate the development of several new products along with increased support for ZapWorks, their flagship content creation tool.

Having worked with over 200 partners from the retail, television, film and packaged goods industries including Warner Bros, Coca-Cola and Manchester City Football Club, Zappar is a leading developer of Augmented Reality experiences and tools. Their free ‘Zappar’ AR smartphone app reacts when the camera is pointed at ‘zapcodes’ found on printed materials, allowing AR content to appear over any surface. Some of this content is produced in-house, but their most exciting venture is ZapWorks, a new creation suite that allows brands, marketing agencies and other external creators to quickly produce their own AR, VR and Mixed Reality content. They have also successfully crowdfunded a Google Cardboard-inspired $30 Mixed Reality solution called ZapBox.

Today, Zappar is announcing the closing of its $3.75m Series A funding round, led by London-based investors Hargreave Hale, along with brand technology business You & Mr Jones and China’s largest independent mobile game publishing platform iDreamSky.

“We’re at a unique moment in time as AR, VR and MR content and technology moves into the mainstream,” said Oliver Bedford, Fund Manager at Hargreave Hale. “There are a number of players entering this space. Zappar are a clear front runner, grounded in an established, effective, robust, and highly scalable content creation technology that caters to all markets and developer needs.”

The funding will accelerate the development of several new products, and will see the expansion of its SaaS Sales team, User Success specialists, R&D and Marketing divisions, extending Zappar’s international reach. The flagship product ZapWorks, which is already being used by leading brands such as Samsung and Vodafone, will receive further development, global marketing and support.

“Zappar is a best-in-class business that empowers businesses and creatives to build best-in-class augmented reality experiences”, said George Prest, Partner at You & Mr Jones, an investor in Niantic, creators of Pokémon Go. “Since launching ZapWorks earlier this year, the platform’s ease of use, breadth of tools and affordable cost structure have resonated very strongly with the market, resulting in clear belief from us in their business potential. Zappar has what it takes to truly democratise AR creation, and we’re looking forward to the company’s successes.”

“This funding round is another great milestone for the business”, said Caspar Thykier, CEO of Zappar. “Zappar’s mission is to democratise augmented reality. AR represents an exciting future for consumer engagement connecting devices to the world around us. With this round our established institutional and trade investors lend further credence to this future as we continue towards AR delivering a digital discovery channel through mobile devices and head-mounted displays.”

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February 2, 2017

‘Rec Room’ Studio Raises $5M “to continue to build the future of Social VR”

Seattle-based VR studio Against Gravity has today announced they have received $5M in seed funding to continue to build Rec Room, the studio’s social VR platform.

Only launching last summer, the app has quickly become a success story, winning over fans on both Steam and Oculus Home with high marks. Rec Room seems to have found a winning formula with its over-the-top, YMCA-style social space, which gives you the ability to do everything from playing leisure sports to fist bumping, letting you create a ‘team’ so you can stay together as you tour the app’s many activities.

Rec Room is markedly more emotive than other social VR platforms, plastering your avatar with a melange of cute emojis that seem to cycle at a nearly human-level. Even if the emotes aren’t tied to your actual facial position though, you really can’t help but smile at them (really, it’s all in your brain).

Against Gravity maintains they’ve raised the $5M “to continue to build the future of Social VR.” Investors include of Sequoia, First Round, Acequia, Vulcan, Maveron, Anorak, Betaworks, The Venture Reality Fund, and many angel investors including investor and new Against Gravity board member Charles Fitzgerald.

The studio says that over 100,000 users visited Rec Room in the second half of 2016, having played over 1 million games, exchanging over 1 million high fives, and firing nearly a billion paintballs at each other—just one of their many games including dodgeball, 3D charades, disc golf, and zero-G paddle ball.

Future improvements to the platform include streamlining the UX and refining systems that can help minimize trolling and harassment. “We want to make it easier to find your current friends and to make new ones. We also plan to give you more ways to interact with those friends, both inside VR and out (oh my!).” writes Against Gravity CEO Nick Fajt in a recent blogpost. “With your help, we’ll be improving and extending both active and passive systems that let you manage specific situations based on your personal preferences, and that help us understand broad community trends to minimize bad interactions in general.”

Fajt formed Against Gravity after working as the Principal Program Manager on the HoloLens team at Microsoft, building the studio with previous HoloLens Creative Director turned CCO Cameron Brown. Fajt maintains the company will be keeping Rec Room free to download, “so anyone can join our community.”

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January 30, 2017January 30, 2017

2016’s Record Breaking VR/AR Venture Funding Totals $1.8 Billion

Oculus Rift at CES 2017 | Photo courtesy Intel

With 2015 breaking previous records, industry observers entered 2016 wondering if VR/AR funding would be able to keep pace.

Guest Article by Clifton Dawson

Clifton is Founder & CEO of Greenlight Insights, a specialty market intelligence company focused exclusively on the VR and AR industries. Prior to Greenlight Insights, Clifton was a growth and monetization analyst at Snapchat, the leading image messaging and multimedia platform. Clifton has a B.A. in Economics from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Dollars and Deals

In 2016, venture funding of VR/AR companies reached $1.8 billion, ending significantly above 2015. Both median deal size and total number of deals in 2016 outpaced those in 2015, with a 58% increase in average deal size and 30% more deals, according to year-end analysis from Greenlight Insights of individual deals back to 2011.

“In 2016, the increase in deal volume and median deals size illustrate a rapidly evolving landscape for VR technology”, said Clifton Dawson, CEO of Greenlight Insights.

While total venture funding for VR/AR showed major gains in 2016, VR/AR still only holds 1% of total venture funding.

“Despite the category’s steady growth since 2011, compared to more mature industries, such as Transportation (9%) and FinTech (3.5%), VR/AR may not yet be mainstream enough for most investors,” said Ryan Rodenbaugh, an analyst with Greenlight that worked on the analysis.

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In fact, throughout 2016, VR/AR deals were largely early stage, with more than 85% of all deals being Seed or Series A stage financings. Series C and later stage deals represented 7% of all deal volume, despite the top 6 VR deals of 2016 averaging nearly more than $65 million each, and the top 6 AR deals of 2016 averaging $170 million (the latter being skewed largely by Magic Leap’s massive Series C).

Investors

VR/AR is benefiting from an increasingly diverse base of investors with widely varying investment theses, with many of the most active firms having done several co-investments. In 2016, the industry continued to see an increasing number of dabblers investing in VR/AR with 397 venture firms investing in one deal each this year. However, most Silicon Valley investors are not yet actively investing, with only 31 firms closing three or more deals since 2011.

Encouragingly, there is a growing list of notable investors committed to the space.

“The top of the most active investor list has remained remarkably stable over the 2015-2016 time period, with HTC, Intel, and Comcast amongst the most active corporate investors, and BoostVC and the Venture Reality Fund amongst the most active dedicated VR/AR funds,” said Dawson.

Looking Ahead to 2017

Over the last year, there has been a noticeable spike in investor interest in content producers as the industry realizes that for VR/AR products to really take off, consumers will soon demand need to have a significant amount of use for the hardware. Aided by huge recent investments in content production studios, funding in location-based VR, gaming and non-gaming entertainment, and live VR broadcasts, companies will attract a larger share of all venture capital dollars flowing to VR/AR. This trend reflects the growing importance of creating consumer-centric content to promote adoption and engagement with recently released devices.

NASA & Caltech Leaders Aim to Revolutionise Big Data Visualization with VR

Virtualitics is new company started by NASA JPL and Caltech alum. offering a new platform to leverage the immersive properties of virtual reality in order to better aid human comprehension and use of ‘Big Data’.

You’ve likely heard the term ‘Big Data’. Despite the phrase being coined perhaps as early as the mid nineties, with information now collected on an ever increasing number of aspects in our daily lives and beyond you’ll likely have heard it mentioned a lot more in recent years. The term is, in a way, unhelpfully generic, but it’s become useful to act as a colloquialism for the vast, virtual data-scapes constructed from aspects which touch every part of our daily lives.

But what to do with all of this information? That’s a good question of course, and there are many around the world tasked with mining different data sources in order to extract previously obfuscated insights into complex problems and behaviours. But a new tool from Virtualitics – a new company formed by NASA JPL and Caltech alum. – aims to instead answer a different question: How do we visualise these vast, multi-dimensional data sets in a way which allows us mere humans to better extract those insights?

“Big Data is worthless if we cannot extract actionable knowledge from it,” said Michael Amori, CEO of Virtualitics. “Visualization can reveal the knowledge hidden in data, but traditional 2-D and 3-D data visualizations are inadequate for large and complex data sets. Our solution is to visualize as many as 10 dimensions in VR/AR all via a Shared Virtual Office, which allows even untrained users to spot patterns in data that can give companies a competitive edge.”

Virtualitics’ new virtual reality data visualisation platform claims a pedigree of over a decade of research from NASA (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Caltech (California Institute of Technology). It aims to utilise the naturalistic way in which people can interact with virtual objects in VR and to assist comprehension and perception by displaying that data in new and interesting ways.

According to professor George Djorgovski, renowned astrophysicist and founder of Virtualitics: “VR is intrinsically well-suited for human perception, intuition and pattern recognition, leading to insights that may be difficult or even impossible to gain through any traditional visualization technique. It is a natural environment for collaborative visual data exploration and data analytics that enables teams of users, who may be continents apart, to interact with the data and with each other in a shared virtual space. It may also be a natural environment where humans can interact with their artificial intelligence assistants.”

Virtualitics also provides a business oriented social space, which allows colleagues from around the world to meet inside the same virtual space and speculate and collaborate on these large, multi-dimensional data-sets in real time.

The new company has also just announced that it has closed a $3M seed round from angel investors in order to develop its technology further.

It’s certainly an interesting project, and another example of the potential of VR outside of the entertainment sphere. However there may be a risk such a project suffers being viewed as a case of The Emperors New Clothes by those now used to their efficient two dimentional, spreadsheet driven world. And in truth, the benefits these new forms of visualisations may offer won’t fully be understood until systems like this have been put to use in the real world for many years. However, as someone who has constantly noted the stark and astonishingly different perspectives VR can offer, I’m inclined to think that there may well be something in Virtualitics

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