Welcome to this month’s viewpoints, news and investment activity covering the Metaverse, XR and Spatial Computing - brought to you by FOV Ventures.

This Month:

• Launching Vantage Point Demo Day.

• Applying VC math to VR.

• Three New Portfolio Companies.

Dave Haynes, Petri Rajahalme and Sointu Karjalainen (FOV Ventures)

Announcing Vantage Point Demo Day.

FOV Ventures and partners will present Europe’s most promising pre-Series A startups at Vantage Point on September 17th.

This virtual demo day exists to shine a light on ambitious European founders who are creating the next wave of billion dollar companies and building at the intersection of areas like Spatial Computing, Generative AI, Gaming and 3D tech.

Vantage Point brings together interested investors, with interesting founders, as well as shed light on a new era of computing through roundtables with industry leaders.

We will be joined by a16z, General Catalyst, Boost, GFR, Konvoy and whole host of other top tier VCs!

The Opportunity for Startups:

• Accelerate fundraising.

• Increase visibility among relevant investors.

• Generate inbound investor interest.

• Enjoy facilitated intros and participate in VC discussions.

Founders, to pitch on the day, save the date and apply by August 22nd HERE.

Investors, signup through the landing page and for non-investors, signup to get access to roundtable recordings below:

FOV NEWS

June was a busy one for FOV Ventures, not just because we announced three new investments, but we have been on the road again.

This time, Petri was at AWE in California. This was the 15th year of the XR conference, and the dual themes of “looking back” and “progress” were present throughout the event.

Three main takeaways from AWE:

🌍 VR is Mainstream: Official confirmation that 20 million Meta Quest 2s have been sold is a significant milestone - surpassing the sales of the iconic and nostalgic Nintendo 64. This reality should be weighed against the common narrative that VR technology is still “too early” for widespread adoption.

🕶️ Augmented Reality Progress: Every year at AWE new demos continue to show more compact and lighter headsets (check out Lumus’ and Avegants prototypes). While we are at least a few years away from true AR in a glasses form factor, there are more VR headset displays with pass-through viewing which will release over the next two to three years and allow for more AR functions in addition to VR. As well as the early rise of simpler, AI-centric smartglasses like the Ray Ban Meta’s.

In the meantime there are billions of iPhones and Android devices out there with robust AR capabilities that people really aren’t taking advantage of as much as we should. Outside of AR filters (Snap has over 1BN user generated filters), 3D-in-2D (e.g. mobile "AR") remains limited.

💼 Enterprise Push: Meta’s keynote led with examples of successful applications of MR for enterprises and education, emphasised that VR’s killer app is training and simulation, using nursing as an example of how higher education uses the medium. We have written before about how Spatial Computing is impacting enterprise, and now the use cases are really stacking up - here is a compiled list of over 300 case studies!

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For Founders, Petri was also on an investor Q&A panel where he and others shared valuable advice. A key topic was understanding the math of venture capital and how it relates to your business and the funds you target.

VCs often look for investments that can return their entire fund, so aligning your business model with their expectations is crucial.

For Immersive Tech founders, this means identifying VCs whose fund size matches the potential market size of VR/AR, or gaming in the near term. Given the niche nature of subcategories within VR, demonstrate how you can achieve growth and returns within the context of growing markets - the nicher your target market the smaller VC funds you will align with.

Other advice was around leveraging VR-centric content - it should utilise the uniqueness of VR. Providing experiences that can’t be replicated elsewhere can help illustrate the potential for high user retention and monetisation. However, to broaden user acquisition, Cross-Platform Accessibility can help align with the investor’s need for substantial growth + returns.

FOV Portfolio News:

Our portfolio company, Doublepoint, were also at AWE, and their WowMouse app was featured as one of the "4 New Things at AWE 2024 That Will Make You Want AR and VR in Your Life" by CNET!

Another AWE event was hands-on events with our new portfolio company, Distance Technologies. To see their incredible glasses-free XR in action, check out this interview with founders Urho and Jussi, and the review from Adam Savage below.

Distance were one three new portfolio companies added in June!

1. Flow Computing enables next-generation performance for the most demanding applications, from locally-hosted AI to general-purpose parallel computing. Read why we invested here.

2. Brainspark Games is building an eduverse of free, 3D-immersive educational mobile games aligned with the UK national curriculum. Read why we invested here.

3. Distance Technologies have created the world’s first glasses-free mixed reality solution. This fundamentally changes how people see and interact with the world around them. Read why we invested here.

FOV Job Board:

• Virtex are hiring for their CTO position, if you want to help shape the future of live entertainment, apply here.

• Brainspark are looking for a Games Designer.

• Distance coming out of stealth are now hiring for several positions.

• View all 30 FOV portfolio jobs here!

Happy summer! Dave Haynes, Petri Rajahalme and Sointu Karjalainen (FOV Ventures)

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