Liverpool-based vTIME has raised $7.6 million (£5.4 million) in Series A funding for Virtual Reality Social Network
There has been a lot of hype around VR in the last year, with many tech companies focusing on new gear, with film companies and studios investing in creating new VR digital worlds with one startup vTime aiming to create a Virtual Reality Social Network.
Led by Deepbridge Capital, using the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), and including investment from Liverpool insitutional loan and equity provider MSIF.
Ray Eugeni, Partner at Deepbridge Capital, commented: “vTime perfectly represents the innovative and disruptive technologies that we at Deepbridge provide investment for. We are delighted to be working in partnership with the vTime team and are excited by the future opportunities for vTime’s market-leading virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.”
Using the vTime app, which has had almost a million downloads, users can join private chat rooms, or customize their avatars and has a focus on ‘discussion’ based interaction, as opposed to gaming.
Looking through vTime’s Press Release, the company says that it would be using the funding to:
- The most immediate benefit will be the release of vTime on more formats AND roadmap is built around ubiquitous access to vTime: whatever the VR HMD of choice, the company wants vTime to be available on all other formats. “This investment will help us achieve this and allow us to continue operating and maintaining the service as the number of platforms we support approaches double digits.”
- Less immediately obvious is how the investment affects what’s happening ‘under the hood’. Most of that is linked to the continuous development of the underlying vTime technology, enabling apps like the company’s own sociable network. Eventually this will manifest itself in new product features for the VR Sociable Network, but also in entirely new products. Forthcoming vTime experiences for AR/MR/XR share our ethos of allowing users to be sociable wherever they are, and communicate and engage with each other through whichever reality is best-suited to their needs.
