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- Viewpoints: November 2021 wrap-up
Viewpoints: November 2021 wrap-up
Welcome to this edition of the newsletter, a curated digest of viewpoints, news and investment activity covering the Metaverse, XR and Spatial Computing. The newsletter is coming to you later than planned as we've been mostly heads down for the last two months, completing a number of angel investments and getting our new fund (FOV Ventures) fully established to continue investing in the next generation of founders building the Metaverse. Stay tuned for more news on that very soon.
If you know of founders, investors or anyone else that would find this investment-focused digest useful then please pass it along!
Dave Haynes & Petri Rajahalme (FOV Ventures)
The multi-trillion dollar battle for the Metaverse
It's been an exceptionally busy couple of months for Metaverse news and funding activity. Facebook's rebranding to Meta has taken the topic mainstream, even getting noticed by Iceland's tourist board. With the rebrand came news that Meta is spending more than $10bn per year on its Metaverse ambitions, has launched a $10m fund for creators using Horizons and will create 10,000 Metaverse related jobs in Europe. Meanwhile it teased its Project Cambria high end mixed reality headset and acquired VR fitness studio Within.
However, Meta's strong conviction and investment towards the Metaverse hasn't been welcomed by everybody, especially many in the Web3 community. As a reaction to this, not one but two, DAO's have sprung into existence with the goal of an open, interoperable Metaverse as their rallying cry. Firstly Matthew Ball auctioned a single edition NFT of his famous 'Metaverse' essay to fund and create the Metaverse DAO. Then this was followed by Crucible's Open Meta Association going public, announcing $4.5m funding to serve as an organizing body for the growth of an open Metaverse built on web3 infrastructure, owned and controlled by the community.
With Epic, Roblox, Niantic, Nvidia and Microsoft amongst may others reiterating their Metaverse intentions these past two months, it certainly can't be denied that the battle for the Metaverse has certainly begun, with trillions of dollars at stake.
New Podcast: "SideQuest's VR Community"
In Episode #7 of the Viewpoints podcast we talked to Orla Harris, co-founder of Sidequest, who recently raised $3m from ProFounders, Connect and ADA Ventures to continue building out its VR content platform.
Having originally grown in popularity as the only real alternative for VR developers to distribute Quest apps and content outside of the Oculus Store, Sidequest now boasts a highly engaged community of 1m VR users. This fresh round of funding will allow SideQuest to grow its product offering towards more community and developer focused tools, as well as expanding to new platforms outside of Meta's sphere of VR influence. For now, that's certainly good news for VR gamers, but over the long term SideQuest could perhaps prove to be one small but important piece of an open and more interoperable Metaverse.
Fundraising Round-Up
Magic Leap raises $500m at a $2bn valuation. This comes ahead of the launch of its upcoming AR headset, Magic Leap 2, which it promises will be smaller, lighter, and tuned to be an “all day” device.
Nreal raises $100m to expand internationally. The Chinese AR glasses manufacturer's funding round was led by YF Capital, NIO Capital, and Angel Plus China, with participation by Sequoia Capital China.
The Sandbox raises $93m in Series B funding. Led by Softbank Vision Fund 2, the round included participation from Animoca Brands, True Global Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, and more.
Animoca Brands raises $65m at $2.2bn valuation from Ubisoft, Sequoia China and others to drive digital property rights via NFTs and gaming to build the open Metaverse.
Sandbox VR raises $37m Series B to expand out-of-home VR locations. In addition to its dozen worldwide locations, Sandbox VR says it’s working to nearly doubling that. The round was led by a16z.
Threekit raises $35m to fuel growth of their 3D visual commerce platform. The company aims to meet the shoppers' growing demand of a more dynamic digital product experience when making purchase decisions.
Dispelix raises $33m led by Atlantic Bridge. Existing investors including Lifeline Ventures, VTT Ventures, Finnish Industry Investment and 3M Ventures participated in this round, bringing the total funding to date to $50 million.
Admix raises $25m to build out advertising in the Metaverse. The Series B was led by Elefund and DIP Capital, with participation from Notion, Speedinvest, Colopl Next and Sure Valley Ventures.
Splash raises $20m funding co-led by Amazon’s Alexa Fund and Bitkraft Ventures. Other investors include Khosla Ventures and King River Capital. Splash refers to itself as the “future of entertainment in the metaverse.”
Praxis Labs raises $15m to provide a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) learning platform designed to train employees through virtual reality (VR) experiences.
Phiar raises $12m to continue developing AI-powered AR navigation solutions that enable every vehicle to have human-like perception capabilities.
FWB (Friends With Benefits) raises $10m from Andreeesen Horowitz, a community first DAO that aims to be the de facto home of web3’s growing creative class.
Ramen VR raises $10m with participation from Makers Fund, Anthos Capital and Dune Ventures. The studio is behind the upcoming VR MMO Zenith: The Last City launching later this year.
Supersocial raises $5.2m to develop games for the fast-growing Roblox platform, as well as anything else that calls itself a metaverse.
Other companies raising money included e.g. Rooom ($7m), Stage11 ($5m), Echo3D ($4m), Futures Factory ($2.5m), Luma ($4.3m), SecondLive (n/a), Inspace ($4m), Chimeras ($2m), Lynx MR-1 ($0.7m) and Toya ($4m).
The property game is home to more than 100,000 landowners across 13 virtual cities.
Exits and M&A
Niantic, makers of Pokemon Go acquires Hoss, a start-up company that will develop a platform and set of tools that makes it easier for developers to work with Niantic’s upcoming Lightship ARDK.
Dapper Labs acquires Brud, the startup behind virtual influencer Lil Miquela. Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties and most recently NBA Top Shot, also launches a new business unit focused on building tools for DAO, or decentralized autonomous organizations.
Qualcomm acquires Swedish automotive tech company Veoneer for $37 per share for its advanced driver assistance system stack that includes sensors and software.
The Glimpse Group acquires XR Terra that provides outcome-focused training programs to educate aspiring XR (VR, AR) professionals including software developers, 3D artists and executives.
Quick Links
Before we sign off for this month, here’s a few extra data points, news and opinion pieces we thought were worth a read:
That’s all for now. Hopefully we'll see some of you at the upcoming Slush conference in Helsinki and please do send us your feedback, comments and interesting new startups in this space!