Breaking Down Billion-Dollar AR/VR Investment In The Last 12 Months

Augmented/Virtual Tech, Real InvestmentAugmented and virtual reality are the new hotness, as VCs and corporates get in on the act. While Facebook’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Oculus got everyone’s attention early last year, it’s only in the last 12 months that investments accelerated.

There was a slow trickle of AR/VR investments from 2006 until late 2014. Then Magic Leapraised $542 million from Google and others. This was the starting gun for investment accelerating, with nearly $1 billion poured into the sector in the last 12 months.

Last quarter alone saw more than 6x the investment in the market from Q2 2014. While VC and corporate communities are still developing an informed focus on the industry, their interest has never been higher.

Digi-Capital AR-VR investments 2011 to 2015

Magic Leap took more than half the money in the last 12 months, and there are reports that they’re raising another billion. VCs and corporates have also become excited beyond our Floridian friends, with an impressive diversity of investment in a market that hasn’t really launched yet.

There have been significant investments in AR/VR head-mounted displays, video, solutions/services, advertising/marketing, games and apps. As the ecosystem begins to take shape, the investment community is providing the fuel to take AR/VR skywards.

Not An Exit Market Yet

Facebook’s Oculus acquisition was another catalyst for investors and corporates, but there has been a bigger impact on investment than M&A so far.

The AR/VR market delivered $250 million of M&As in the last 12 months, with Intel buying Recon accounting for around three-quarters of the total. That could change dramatically next year, as major corporates try to leapfrog the competition through buying hot startups.

Virtually Guaranteed To Be Augmented

With the AR/VR market beginning to launch, the investment community today is divided into true believers like Intel, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, and those taking a wait and see attitude.

There will be bumps in the road next year, but fortune favors the brave in early stage investment markets. When the market gets going and there are a few more chunky exits, it’s going to become increasingly hard for folks to stay on the sidelines.

Comments

Workato Chat Bot Brings Enterprise Workflow Into Slack

As we head into 2016, enterprise chat applications like Slack are suddenly a hot commodity, and if you’re inside chat a good portion of the day the argument goes, you should be able to access other work without leaving the chat client. This is exactly what Workato’s newly announced chat bot, Workbot, is designed to do. Chat bots are small programs that integrate with a chat platform and provide some advanced type of functionality in a fairly easy fashion. The new Workbot-chat bot enables users to access and control over 100 enterprise applications such as a Salesforce CRM record, Quickbooks accounting information or Zendesk customer service interactions directly inside of Slack. One of the primary issues with early Enterprise 2.0 tools was that they were just another application busy employees needed to pay attention to. The idea here is to give users customer information directly in the context of the discussion they may be having...

Best Web Design Company in Pondicherry

#Technology has two faces. We all feel it, but sometimes can’t find words to describe it. #Ebooks are the best example to show the 0-1 nature of emotions the #technology evokes. #itwhere provide a #Best #solutions to #Growyourbusiness feel free to drop a #Mail info@itwheretech.co.in www.itwheretech.co.in

Montana-based mapping startup onXmaps raises a round of funding fit for Big Sky Country

A mapping startup based in Missoula, Mont., which allows users to download sophisticated offline topographic maps outlining public and private lands and a number of other features geared towards hunting, fishing and camping, has pulled in its first major outside funding. onXmaps has closed a $20.3 million Series A round led by Summit Partners. Bessemer Venture Partners, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Next Frontier Capital and NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke also participated in the round. The company is calling the fundraise one of the biggest ever among startups based in Montana. onX Hunt app This is impressively the first bout of outside funding that the 70-person startup has ever taken since being founded in 2009. The company’s founder and CEO Eric Siegfried, an avid outdoorsman himself, had created a more basic program to integrate these maps with his own Garmin GPS. After finding his friends were interested in having a product like this too, he put down $27k of his...

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop

Google Android may have been developed as a smartphone operating system (and later ported to tablets, TVs, watches, and other platforms), but over the past few years we’ve seen a number of attempts to turn it into a desktop operating system. One of the most successful has been Remix OS , which gives Android a taskbar, start menu, and an excellent window management system. The Remix OS team has also generated a lot of buzz over the past year, and this week the operating system gained a lot of new alpha testers thanks to a downloadable version of Remix OS that you can run on many recent desktop or notebook computers. But Remix OS isn’t the only game in town. Phoenix OS is another Android-as-desktop operating system, and while it’s still pretty rough around the edges, there are a few features that could make it a better option for some testers. Some background I first discovered Phoenix OS from a post in the Remix OS Google Group , altho...

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog