Welcome to this month’s curated digest of viewpoints, news and investment activity covering the Metaverse, XR and Spatial Computing - brought to you by FOV Ventures. We're always on the lookout for fellow investors and founders, so if you find the digest useful, please forward us along!

We are also having a chat about the success and growth of Ready Player Me, happening on 8 November - we hope to see you there.

Dave Haynes & Petri Rajahalme (FOV Ventures)

In this edition:

• News from FOV Ventures

• Funding and acquisitions

• Analysis

• Datapoints

News from FOV Ventures

Last month we attended AWE Conference in Lisbon where he held a founder dinner with our friends at Bitkraft Ventures and hosted a panel on the main stage about the importance of diversity in the Metaverse. Watch it back here. We were also featured in this Business Insider article, which looked into VR/AR startup opportunities.

This month we'll be at NFT.London and Slush. If you're there then please come and meet us! We've also been playing around with our shiny new Quest Pro's, which we've been thoroughly enjoying. If you're a startup targeting this new device then let us know by responding to this email and let's chat.

Most importantly, we've just completed our 7th investment as a fund. Who are these investments, you may be asking? We'll be announcing them all very soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

Funding and acquisitions

SideQuest is already a well-respected platform in the VR space, allowing many companies to launch their apps and get started with deploying unique and innovative experiences. The company has now raised $12m, to continue expanding its efforts. The largest funding this month came from Improbable, who raised $100m to expand its metaverse efforts and host as many players as possible.

Metaverse applications continued to receive a healthy level of investment as well. META.VRS raised $3m in funding, to become the 'Shopify' of the metaverse. Immersive and VR titles saw some love, as VUZ raised $20m to scale its social app. ForeVR Games raised $10m to build out its library of VR titles - or if you want to test your swing, then Golf+ raised $6m as well.

Training and education titles received support over October. HTX Labs raised $3m to grow its military and business training simulations, while Oxford Medical Simulation raised £2m to offer virtual training and help fill the talent gap in the UK. If you need to relax, then Floreo raised $10m to continue developing its therapeutic VR content, while Pixaera raised £5m to develop its vision as 'Roblox for the enterprise.' Or if you want to learn more skills on the metaverse, Meraki Academy raised $500k to help you with just that.

Capturing spaces and assets saw a spike in funding. Resonai raised $20m to help create digital twins of buildings, while Yoom raised $15m to continue expanding its volumetric capabilities. Meanwhile, Didimo raised $7m to bring digital human avatars into virtual spaces.

On acquisitions, Journey acquired The Devhouse Agency to continue building its in-house capabilities. Meanwhile, Meta acquires a smorgasbord of VR companies such as Twisted Pixel Games, Armature Studio, and Camouflaj (though still need to testify in US court over acquiring Within).

Analysis

Meta released the Quest Pro this month, doubling down on the enterprise side of the metaverse. As the most developed side of immersive technologies, Meta is betting big on servicing large companies while continually innovating on the consumer side. We should expect the Quest 3 in late 2023.

We like the Quest Pro a lot. Applications like Cubism show the power of passthrough mixed reality, and we look forward to seeing what else comes out of using the cutting-edge tech.

Hot on Meta's heels is Pico, who unveiled the Pico 4 Enterprise. A price-competitive alternative, it also offers face and eye tracking alongside a suite of business-related benefits. While Meta dominates in the US, Pico is aiming to expand quickly in Europe and Asia to develop a portfolio of enterprise connections and customers. The headset will start shipping in December.

Datapoints

• $1.93bn: Amount of virtual land bought over the last 12 months, according to DappRadar.

• 62 million: the number of clothing and accessory items made in Roblox during the last year.

• 285,000: Number of people who played Arena Crash - a popular mini-game - in Horizon Worlds.

That’s all for now. Have a great November, and as always, please do send us your feedback, comments, or any interesting new startups you know of in this space!

Dave Haynes & Petri Rajahalme (FOV Ventures)

http://fov.ventures