Baobab Studios creates character-driven virtual reality animated experiences, emphasizing storytelling over technical novelty. Its notable work includes the 6-minute VR short “Invasion!”, which attracted Hollywood attention and is being turned into a feature film by Roth Kirschenbaum. The company announced a next project titled “Asteroids!” and says its core tech will enable new storytelling techniques for VR creators. Baobab has partnered with major platform players—previous investors include Samsung and HTC—and its title “Invasion!” was included on the PlayStation VR demo disc. The studio has about 20 employees and is expanding its executive team, adding former Pixar/Dreamworks exec Larry Cutler as CTO and bringing Within CEO Chris Milk onto its advisory board. Financially, Baobab has raised a total of $31 million to date following its latest round and positions storytelling as central to driving VR adoption as hardware becomes widely available. Baobab Studios is a US virtual reality animation content and technology company that creates story- and character-driven cinematic experiences. It produces animated short films for VR platforms; its first short, Invasion, is available in Samsung Gear VR. The company plans to work with HTC to distribute its movies on the Vive platform in the coming year. On June 12, 2015 Baobab raised $6m in a Series A funding round. Backers included Comcast Ventures, Samsung Ventures, HTC, Advancit Capital, Chernin Group, TheBoxGroup, Peter Thiel, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus and other angel investors. Leadership includes Maureen Fan (CEO), Eric Darnell (Chief Creative Officer) and Michael Hutchinson (Chief Scientist Officer).

Total raised

$31M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Oct 2016