High Fidelity is a social virtual reality startup founded and led by Philip Rosedale, one of Second Life’s original creators. The company is building a framework for a linked universe of user-generated VR worlds with a backbone designed to scale as VR hardware improves. It has invested heavily in blockchain infrastructure, including a Digital Asset Registry, to enable true ownership of digital goods and to power in-game transactions. High Fidelity also founded the Virtual Reality Blockchain Alliance to promote avatar portability and blockchain-linked purchases across platforms. The startup is in beta, employs about 60 people with 7–8 engineers focused on blockchain work, and has raised roughly $70 million in total funding. Rosedale projects VR could reach 1 billion users and that the market for in-game goods could hit $1 trillion over the coming decade. High Fidelity, founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, builds deployable virtual worlds that users can spin up from templates and access instantly. Each space functions like a small video‑game world populated with 3D models similar to Unity assets, where users can chat, manipulate objects, and add custom behavior via JavaScript. The platform supports importing or sculpting models, realistic physics interactions (demonstrated with a billiards table), naturalistic facial/gesture capture, and 3D audio to approximate immersive VR chatrooms. Its core codebase is open source, allowing anyone to host worlds on their own machines rather than buying one‑time licenses. Planned monetization includes paid name reservations, an asset store for models and code with High Fidelity taking a small cut, and context‑sensitive advertising. Financially, the company recently raised an additional $11M in a round led by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, according to an SEC filing confirmed to TechCrunch. High Fidelity is a new stealth startup from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale alongside ex-Linden Lab staffers Freddy Heiberger and Ryan Karpf. The company says it is prototyping the technology and user experience of a next-generation virtual reality system and exploring "big ideas" about the future of information spaces, address schemas, and navigational metaphors. Job postings describe an expansive vision with multiple moving parts and unique, compelling new technology. Public details about the product are limited beyond those descriptions. Per an SEC filing the startup has raised $2.4 million of a planned $3.4 million round, with Rosedale, Heiberger and Karpf listed in the filing. Given the team's Second Life experience and Rosedale's prior work, observers are watching to see what the next-generation VR system will look like.

Total raised

$48M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

Jun 2018