Investment

Pioneering VR Studio Fast Travel Games Raises $4M

fast travel, fast travel games, Investment, News, VR Investment / Ryan Harris / October 13, 2023

Fast Travel Games, the developer and publisher behind a host of VR games, announced it’s closed a new investment of $4 million, something the company says will help it further develop its own IP for VR platforms as well as support ongoing publishing initiatives.

The latest round was led by Handelsbanken Fonder, with existing owners Industrifonden, Brightly Ventures, Creades and Inbox Capital among others also adding new funds.

The Stockholm-based studio is known for developing VR games Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife (2021), Apex Construct (2018), The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets (2019), and Cities: VR (2022).

Having opened its own publishing wing in 2021, Fast Travel Games signed on as publisher to a slew of indie titles, including Broken Edge (2022), We Are One (2023), EVERSLAUGHT Invasion (2023), and Virtuoso (2022).

“The VR games market continues to grow at a steady pace, and with the introduction of the PS VR2 and the Quest 3 this year, and the Apple Vision Pro around the corner, we’re confident this growth will continue,” said Oskar Burman, CEO and co-founder of Fast Travel Games. “We now have twelve games on the market, and we’re just about to launch our most ambitious game yet – Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice. We also saw our revenues grow 70% last year to 5M+ USD, and our strong growth continues this year. With this new investment we’re in a solid position to capitalize on this new exciting gaming frontier.”

Besides Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice, the studio says it’s currently working on two other VR games in particular: a multiplayer game based on original IP called Mannequin, and an unannounced title.

Fast Travel Games also recently revealed it’s in a partnership with MoonHood, a new studio from the creators of games like Lost in Random, to develop a VR game based on physical models. Next year, the team will also publish Project Demigod, a physics-based superhero sandbox from New York-based indie Omnifarious Studios.

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Seasoned VR Devs Raise $1.6 Million for New Studio Focused on Virtual Pet Experience

Amy Conchie, Ben Vance, Bernard Yee, Investment, News, Stefani Swiatkowski, VR Investment, windup minds / Ryan Harris / August 12, 2023

Windup Minds is a newly announced XR studio which has raised a $1.6 million seed investment for immersive experiences focused on virtual pets and companions.

Windup Minds was founded earlier this year by Bernard Yee, Ben Vance, Amy Conchie, and Stefani Swiatkowski. The quartet of seasoned VR developers have collectively worked at Oculus, WeVR, Microsoft, EA, and more, with works under their belt like Oculus demo projects Bogo, Toy Box, and First Steps, along with mainstream gaming projects like Destiny, Plants vs. Zombies, and Dishonored.

The quartet announced this week it raised $1.6 million in seed funding to get the “remote-first” studio Windup Minds off the ground. The seed investment was led by the Venture Reality Fund, Acequia Capital, and New Leaf Ventures, with participation by Nate Mitchell (founder, Oculus), Eden Chen (founder, Pragma; Riot Games), James Gwertzman (founder, Playfab; PopCap/EA), Tom Sanocki (Oculus; Pixar), Greg Essig (Apple), and Anthony Batt (Outsider DAO).

The studio says it plans to launch a “virtual creature experience for mixed and virtual reality platforms,” indicating a focus on pet-like virtual companions. The studio believes the combination of immersive XR and modern AI can create virtual companions that feel more real than any that have existed to date.

“The medium of XR is uniquely capable of building emotional connections with characters as vibrant and three-dimensional as any pet. when we built Dreamdeck [an early Oculus demo experience] for Mark [Zuckerberg] and Brendan [Iribe] to announce the Rift headset at the first Oculus Connect, we saw players tear their prototype headsets off when our T-Rex came towards them,” says co-founder Bernard Yee. “They intellectually knew they were in a little demo cubicle, but their instinctual brains told them ‘there’s a dinosaur in the room with you.’ VR and MR can make you feel like your digital pet is real—and no other medium can do this.”

The studio hasn’t indicated when they plan to announce or launch their first experience.

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Collaborative Spatial Design App ‘ShapesXR’ Raises $8.6M, Expanding to Apple Vision Pro & Other Headsets

AR Design, Investment, News, VR Design, VR Investment / Mike M. / August 10, 2023

ShapesXR is a collaborative spatial design app built to make it easy to prototype spatial interfaces, interactions, and environments. The company announced today it has raised an $8.6 million seed investment, part of which the company plans to use to expand to more headsets.

While so many VR interfaces and interactions borrow heavily (if not entirely) from existing ‘flat’ design paradigms, ShapesXR is built on the premise that in order to build spatial applications you need spatial design tools. With that in mind, the app functions like a freeform canvas that allows users to mock up designs inside of VR to understand how everything fits together at scale and in 3D. With collaborative functionality, multiple people can work on projects simultaneously.

Right now that collaboration is limited to those with a Quest headset, but as part of an $8.6 million seed investment, ShapesXR says it plans to expand the app to Apple Vision Pro, Pico, and Magic Leap headsets, opening the door to broader accessibility and cross-headset collaboration.

The seed investment was led by Supernode Global, with participation from Triptyq VC, Boost VC, Hartmann Capital, and Geek Ventures.

Inga Petryaevskaya, CEO and Founder of ShapesXR says, “VR has such huge potential to transform how we all collaborate on projects and design new products, however, one of the main barriers to entry is the level of technical skill required to get started. ShapesXR has been built to remove these hurdles—it’s as easy to learn as PowerPoint. This truly democratizes 3D content creation and enables anyone to become a VR, AR and mixed reality storyteller.”

Beyond just creating shapes and scenes, ShapesXR also has a ‘layers’ function which lets users create slideshows of spatial content. This works like a simple flip-book animation, except in a 3D environment instead of a flat doodle at the corner of your notebook. Using the layers function, designers can prototype and show how spatial content should interact with the user, which allows design work to be done before any of the interactions are actually programmed.

“ShapesXR’s goal is to become the de facto industry standard for [spatial] UI/UX design—achieving for spatial computing what Figma did for the mobile computing era,” the company said in its seed investment announcement.

Collaborative Spatial Design App ‘ShapesXR’ Raises $8.6M, Expanding to Apple Vision Pro & Other Headsets Read More »

Pimax Secures $30M Series C1 Funding to Expand & Support Rollout of Crystal & Portal VR Headsets

Investment, News, Pimax, pimax crystal, pimax investment, pimax portal, pimax series c, pimax vr, VR Investment / Ryan Harris / March 2, 2023

Pimax, the China-based creator known for its wide field of view (FOV) VR headsets, announced it’s secured a $30 million series C1 financing round, something the company says will aid in the rollout of its new portfolio of VR devices.

The series C1 was led by Beijing-based investment firm Tuanmu Capital. This follows the company’s $20 million series B in 2020, bringing the company’s lifetime outside investment to over $69 million.

In a press statement, the company says the funds will be used to accelerate growth of its coming line of VR headsets, Pimax Crystal and Pimax Portal, enhance its position as both a consumer and enterprise-focused company, and increase investment in R&D.

Founded in 2015, Pimax is best known for its first Pimax “8K” headset Kickstarted in 2017, a consumer PC VR headset that included dual 4K panels providing an estimated 200-degree FOV, by far one of the largest in the industry at the time. Even today, many consumer headsets, such as Meta Quest 2 and HTC Vive XR Elite, feature FOVs around 110 degrees.

The company has since gone on to offer multiple iterations of its wide FOV headset, but also is set to launch both its VR standalone Pimax Crystal and hybrid Portal device, the latter of which can convert between a Nintendo Switch-style gaming handheld and a VR headset.

Both Pimax Crystal and Pimax Portal are expected to release at some point in “early 2023”, with Crystal available for pre-order on the company’s website and Portal still in the fulfillment stage from its successful 2022 Kickstarter, which garnered just over $350,000 from backers.

“Of course, we’re delighted with this new round of funding, as it allows us to boost our production capacity to meet the rapidly growing demand for our new VR products, as well as to improve both our hardware and software further,” said Pimax Founder Robin Weng. “We’ve been innovating VR technology and we will keep on doing that in the future, always pushing the limits of what is possible through technology.”

The Shanghai-based company now boasts over 300 employees in offices spread across offices in San Jose, Stockholm, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Qingdao, and Chengdu.

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VR Education Startup Raises $12.5M to Teach Math and More Using VR in Schools

immersive learning, Investment, math vr, News, prisms, prisms vr, VR Education, VR Investment, vr math education / Blake Jones / February 2, 2023

Prisms VR, an immersive platform for teaching math, announced it’s raised $12.5 million in a Series A round, which the company says will be used to expand its VR math literacy platform to more schools across the US.

Led by Andreessen Horowitz, the latest funding round brings Prisms VR’s lifetime funding to $19.1 million, according to CrunchBase.

Launched in 2021, Prisms focuses on teaching math in VR through problem-driven, tactile and visual learning. Essentially, it immerses students by confronting them with real-world problems—a far sight from the sort of drab word problems which typically involve far too many watermelons for comfort.

Prisms was founded by Anurupa Ganguly, who has taught math and physics across both Boston and New York City. The app’s development, Ganguly explains, was in response to the US education system, and how math instruction doesn’t appeal to real life situations.

“Technology has failed our students, especially where math is concerned. With new developments in immersive tech, we have the opportunity to make learning experiential and connected to students’ lives,” said Ganguly, founder and CEO at Prisms. “Prisms is the first learning solution that empowers students to experience real-life problems with their bodies versus reading about them divorced from personal experience. They are then able to build up to shorthand abstractions from intuitive visual and tactile experiences that lead to enduring retention and deeper understanding.”

The company says it’s using the funds to accelerate growth and adoption of its product and team in addition to expanding programs to more schools across the US. The company is also currently developing products aimed at higher education and other subjects as well.

The startup’s Meta Quest app is available to parents, tutors and teachers with a seven-day free trial, costing $24 for an annual subscription to its growing library of immersive lessons. For now, it includes around two dozen modules, teaching from middle school fractions all the way to advanced algebra.

To date, Prisms has already been adopted by 100+ school districts across 26 states, the company says, bringing its app to more than 80,000 students.

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VR Training Company Gemba Secures $18M Series A to Expand Enterprise Metaverse

Enterprise VR, gemba, Investment, News, the gemba, the leadership network, VR Investment, vr training / Ryan Harris / January 26, 2023

Gemba, the corporate VR learning platform, announced it’s closed an $18 million Series A funding round, which the company says will be used to continue expansion into Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North America.

The latest funding round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, now valuing the UK-based company at $60 million.

In 2017, Gemba grew out of executive training company The Leadership Network, which was founded in 2013 by CEO Nathan Robinson and Chairman Victor Lewis. At the time, The Leadership Network was focused on cross-industry leadership training which, through its executive masterclasses, let senior execs from non-competing companies go hands-on at the state-of-the-art facilities of global giants like Toyota, Tesla, Google, BMW and Amazon.

Now the company is all-in with VR training platform Gemba, which also still holds masterclasses, albeit in virtual reality. The platform also focuses on immersive skill transfer, including things like on-the-job VR skill training, simulated factory walks, and live training events in VR.

Gemba has since worked with 4,000 executives from more than 675 companies, including Philips, Pfizer, Nike and Dell.

Its most recent success story involves Aptiv, a leading automotive supplier. Gemba says its VR training enabled Aptiv to increase skill transfer efficiency by 80% when compared to real-world training programs. In the first year of working with Aptiv, the company also saved $2 million on travel expenses alone.

“As an educator, we know that 90% of learning is about engagement,” says Frankie Cavanagh, Gemba’s Chief Technology Officer. “Gemba allows users to learn and train in a whole new way. With higher engagement levels than traditional teaching and the combination of unprecedented levels of realism and a customized learning experience, it’s a revolutionary teaching tool.”

Gemba says its Series A will accelerate the development of the platform, enabling people and companies to access Gemba on a subscription basis. It’s also set to expand its offering of immersive training simulations, tools and learning experiences, all of which are accessible via online app stores.

VR Training Company Gemba Secures $18M Series A to Expand Enterprise Metaverse Read More »

Saudi Arabia Gains Majority Stake in Magic Leap in $450M Deal

AR Investment, Investment, magic leap, magic leap 2, magic leap investment, ml, ml2, News / Ryan Harris / January 4, 2023

Saudi Arabia has taken majority share of the US-based augmented reality company Magic Leap, The Telegraph reports, widening the stake via its state-owned sovereign wealth fund with a deal amounting to $450 million.

Citing delayed accounts obtained from its European division, the company is said to have raised $150 million in preferred convertible stock and $300 million in debt from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) over the course of 2022. The investment puts the country’s ownership of Magic Leap over 50 percent, giving it overall majority control.

The Telegraph reports that, as of November 2022, Saudi Arabia’s PIF is “entitled to appoint four of the eight directors of the board of directors of Magic Leap.”

The wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, invests in projects considered to be strategically significant to diversifying its national economy.

Through PIF, Saudi Arabia owns minority stakes in Uber, Capcom, Nexon, Live Nation, Boeing, Meta, Alphabet, Citigroup, Disney, and Bank of America to name a few. It also owns Premier League football team Newcastle United and LIV Golf, a challenger to the PGA Tour.

Founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, the Plantation, Florida-based company kicked off its consumer ambitions with a long and ambitious tease of its first AR headset, Magic Leap 1 (previously styled ‘One’), starting its marketing campaign as it emerged from stealth in 2014.

Released nearly four years later, the developer-focused ‘Creator Edition’ headset was initially priced at an eye-watering $2,300, which not only deflated some of the potent hype behind the unicorn startup, but also cemented a long and bumpy road ahead if Magic Leap wanted to eventually offer its tech at a consumer price point.

Having awkwardly straddled the prosumer segment with limited success, in mid-2020 Abovitz announced he would be stepping down as CEO, signaling a pivot that would refocus the company’s efforts on servicing enterprise instead of consumers. Shortly afterward, Microsoft’s Executive VP of Business Development Peggy Johnson took the reins as CEO of Magic Leap.

The company has since released its follow-up headset, Magic Leap 2, to enterprise partners and through third-party vendors, putting the device in direct competition with Microsoft’s HoloLens 2.

To date, Magic Leap has raised $4 billion, with minority investors including Google, Alibaba, Qualcomm, AT&T, and Axel Springer.

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‘Swords of Gargantua’ Studio Thirdverse Secures $15M, Aims to Bring Latest Titles to PSVR 2

altair breaker, Investment, News, swords of gargantua, thirdverse, VR Investment, x8, yomuneco / Ryan Harris / December 3, 2022

Japanese VR studio Thirdverse today revealed it’s raised $15 million, something the Swords of Gargantua developer says will be used to expand global recruitment and develop new Web3 and VR titles.

In its latest round, MZ Web3 Fund has signed on as the lead investor, bringing the company’s overall outside funding to $33 million.

As an investor in Thirdverse, MZ Web3 Fund joins 8DAO, B Dash Ventures, double jump.tokyo Inc., Fenbushi Capital, FLICK SHOT, Holdem Capital, KUSABI, OKCoinJapan, OKX Ventures and Yield Guild Games.

The Tokyo-based studio says it plans to release more than 10 Web3 games through 2023 beyond its upcoming title, Captain Tsubasa – Rivals, and is currently recruiting more game developers to expand the development line.

As for VR, Thirdverse announced it’s bringing its latest sword-fighting game ALTAIR BREAKER (2022) to PSVR 2 at some point, which was initially released on Meta Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets in August.

The studio’s upcoming multiplayer tactical hero shooter, called X8, is also coming to PSVR 2 in addition to Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets. XR was developed by Thirdverse’s US-based studio.

Thirdverse says in a press statement it aims to “strengthen the recruitment of VR game creators for the development of new titles, scheduled for release in 2023 and beyond.”

‘Swords of Gargantua’ Studio Thirdverse Secures $15M, Aims to Bring Latest Titles to PSVR 2 Read More »