Saturday, 3 July, 2021 UTC


Summary

Let’s talk about the flow of VC money and acquisitions. Many immersive companies are suddenly getting a lot of money to finance their growth, with a renewed interest in expanding their operations or speeding up their growth. Just a few examples: 
  • JigSpace raised $4.7m in Series A funding; 
  • Tripp raised $11m in Series A funding
  • Virti raised $10m in Series A funding
  • VRChat raised $80m in Series D funding
  • Magnopus acquired REWIND. 
All of this was within the last week and a half, and not including every company in the area (I try my best!)
Why is everyone raising cash now? The Gartner fans would say we have climbed our way out of the trough of disillusionment and scaling up the slope of enlightenment. We may even reach the plateau of productivity, though we’ll have a few casualties along the way. But the point is that there is a renewed trust in immersive technologies, and their impact across social worlds, meditation, and 3D model creation. 
The way I am wording this implies that the growth will be equally distributed across AR and VR, as the immersive space grows together. Not so. The most likely area of healthy growth will remain in enterprise-side applications until the consumer-end hardware and software gets good enough. But for now, we are seeing the bricks of the future laid down.
The best we can take away from it is that investors have a renewed hope on the underlying principles of immersive. The investments will either pay off, or crash a la the 2017-style bubble. Personally, I hope that we celebrate with bubbles of champagne over financial pops. 

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The post Why VR/AR companies have seen a surge in investment appeared first on Virtual Perceptions.