vr investment – Page 7 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

April 1, 2020

Strivr Secures $30M Series B Financing to Accelerate Adoption of VR Training

Strivr, the immersive VR training company, announced the successful completion of a $30 million financing round, something the startup says will help it further expand adoption of enterprise-focused immersive learning.

The Series B financing round was led by Georgian Partners, with participation by venture capital firms including Franklin Templeton, Prologis Ventures, GreatPoint Ventures and Alumni Ventures Group. The latest round brings the company’s overall investment to $51 million.

Strivr is focused on building immersive learning software using VR headsets. It’s created VR training programs for the likes of Verizon, jetBlue, Fidelity, GE’s FieldCore, and Walmart, the latter of which was apparently so successful that the big box store expanded the VR learning program to all of its 4,700 nationwide, bringing with it over 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to US-based Walmart stores back in 2018.

Although it now puts a major focus on retail and industrial training, Strivr actually first catered to professional and collegiate sports teams when it was founded in 2015 by former Stanford Cardinal kicker Derek Belch and Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human interaction Lab.

“With more than 1.5 million training sessions conducted in VR and over 22,000 headsets deployed across our customer base, Strivr has developed the world’s only end-to-end software platform for the delivery of immersive solutions to elevate workforce learning and performance,” said Belch.

As a part of the latest financing round, Strivr takes on its board of directors Tyson Baber, partner at Georgian Partners.

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February 12, 2020

Oxford VR Therapy Platform Lands £10 Million In Investment

UK-based Oxford VR hopes to lead the way in automated VR therapy in the future, and it just raised £10 million to help achieve that goal.

The company, which span out of Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry in 2017, raised the money in a Series A round of funding led by Optum Ventures. According to a press release, the new funds will “enable Oxford VR to accelerate US expansion of its evidence-based and scalable automated VR therapy solution and to continue to expand its treatment pipeline.”

Oxford VR is looking to turn many of the proposed health benefits of VR into a reality in the coming years. The company started out with a clinical trial, testing VR’s ability to treat a fear of heights. Since those that trial, it’s expanded its offering to tackle areas like OCD and social anxiety too.

The platform offers automated treatment aligned with clinical standards and protocol, creating simulated events that can trigger these issues and help sufferers confront them in a safe, controlled environment. You can see an example of the company’s work tackling a fear of heights in a patient below.

Currently the company is partnering with AXA Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) to bring its work to Asia, while a partnership with the National Mental Health Innovation Centre (NMHIC) is doing the same for the US.

VR’s ability to simulate reality presents plenty of possible healthcare benefits for the future. Beyond Oxford VR’s offerings, we’ve also seen surgical training platforms like FundamentalVR embrace the technology.

The post Oxford VR Therapy Platform Lands £10 Million In Investment appeared first on UploadVR.

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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October 31, 2019

FundamentalVR Raises $5.6M Investment to Further Develop VR Surgery Training Tools

FundamentalVR, a company specializing in VR medical training, has closed a £4.3 million (~$5.6 million) Series A funding round in effort to further develop its surgical training and data analysis platform, Fundamental Surgery.

The funding round was led by Downing Ventures, with participation from Epic Private Equity, and Brighteyes Ventures. Leading medical institutions also participated in the funding round, including the world-renowned Mayo Clinic and Sana Kliniken, the third largest hospital organization in Germany.

This brings FundamentalVR’s total investment to $9.3 million, the company says. Its penultimate financing round in 2018, amounting to $1.4 million, coincided with a partnership to develop its VR training platform with Mayo Clinic surgeons and clinical practitioners, as well as its 3D modelling, data scientists and simulation specialists.

Fundamental Surgery, the company’s flagship product, has found its way to a number of medical institutions across seven countries, including Mayo Clinic and UCLA in the United States, UCLH in the United Kingdom, and Sana in Germany with initial training packages focused on the orthopedic surgical disciplines. The procedures it currently supports include Spinal Pedicle Screw, Total Hip Arthroplasty (Posterior), Total Hip Arthroplasty (Anterior) and Total Knee Arthroplasty, the company says in a press statement.

“We identified early on that FundamentalVR’s team was developing a platform that was very special,” Tern CEO, Al Sisto said. “A training and data analysis offering which could revolutionise the skills development of surgical practice, while at the same time creating a database of significant importance to the industry. We are delighted that the value and relevance of this exciting business and its entire staff has been recognised by this outstanding syndicate of new investors we helped solidify.”

Following the most recent funding round, Tern’s shareholding in FundamentalVR comes to 26.9%, with a valuation of £3.0 million (~$3.88 million).

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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.”

The company currently runs centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Macau, and Singapore. Locations in Austin, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Diego are marked as “coming soon” on the company’s website.

The company says a total of 16 total locations are however planned to open by the end of 2020.

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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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September 5, 2019

Immersive Social Platform ‘VRChat’ Raises $10 Million in Venture Capital

VRChat announced today that it has closed a $10 million Series C investment to continue expanding its immersive social platform which is steeped in user-generated content.

VRChat is an immersive social platform that allows VR and non-VR users to socialize in a connected virtual world while exploring user-generated spaces and activities. The platform’s laissez faire attitude to user-generated content and non-prescriptive gameplay makes it unique among competitors like Rec Room and Bigscreen.

The sometimes zany mashup of aesthetics and activities has also made the game popular on the livestreaming scene, with the game ranking in the top 100 Twitch titles by average viewers, according to Twitch tracker SullyGnome.

VRChat Series C Investment

Having raised $5.2 million in venture capital previously, VRChat today announced it has raised an additional $10 million in a Series C investment. VC firm Makers Fund joins the round as a new investor alongside prior investors HTC, Brightstone VC, and GFR Fund.

“Graham, Jesse and Ron [VRChat’s founders] have a bold vision to enable and empower diverse communities through limitless virtual identities and experiences,” says Jay Chi, Founding Partner of Makers Fund. “We see great potential here and are very excited to partner with the VRChat team on this journey”

Still in the startup phase, VRChat is completely free and has not yet moved to monetize the platform.

VRChat’s Viral Moment

VRChat first launched in 2017 and saw slow but steady traction before having a ‘viral moment’, driven by Twitch livestreamers and dank VRChat-inspired memes, which saw the game’s player count on Steam surge more than 25x over the course of one and a half months. Much of that viral surge seems to have translated into lasting traction, with the game consistently seeing 10x the player count compared to before its moment in the spotlight.

A sudden spike of Twitch viewers (red) precedes a moment of exponential player growth (blue), peaking at 20,000 players in January, 2018 | Data and graph courtesy SteamDB

Similar stats are not available for other platforms where the game is available (like on Oculus) so the scale of usership elsewhere, and how it was impacted by the viral moment, is not clear. However, VRChat said at the that in 2018 it had seen 4 million unique users, 30% of which were using VR.

The platform most recently launched on Oculus Quest, and is also available on Oculus Rift and Steam (Vive, Index, Rift, and Non-VR).

VRChat’s Series C investment comes just a few months after Rec Room announced a $24 million in additional funding from previously undisclosed Series A and Series B investments.

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