• VRChat

  Participated · Equity · Sep 2017

  VRChat is a social virtual reality platform enabling users to create, publish, and explore user-generated virtual worlds, avatars, games, events, and hangouts. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, it is available on Steam, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, and VIVEPORT, with additional platforms planned. The platform hosts millions of users, hundreds of thousands of worlds, over ten million unique avatars, and peaks at over 40,000 concurrent users; it is the top free VR application on both Steam and the Oculus Rift store. VRChat emphasizes creative freedom and has become a cultural phenomenon tied to internet memes, events, and online communities. The company plans to build a creator economy where members can earn, improve social discovery for more meaningful experiences, and expand to more platforms. VRChat is actively hiring to support continued development and community growth. VRChat is a social virtual-reality platform that enables users to create, publish and explore virtual worlds with other VR users around the world. The company positions itself to make VR more social. VRChat is available on HTC’s Viveport store. HTC led a $4 million investment in the company. Other investors in the round included Brightstone VC, GVR Fund, and Rothenberg Ventures. VRChat is a social virtual reality (VR) platform that allows users to create, publish, and explore VR worlds with other users around the world. The platform enables users to personalize experiences with custom avatars, worlds, hangouts, and game experiences and offers cross-platform VR support via Steam for Vive and Oculus Home. Additional platform integrations were planned throughout 2017. Founded in 2014 and based in San Francisco, VRChat focuses on empowering users to build and share social VR content. The company raised a $1.2 million Seed investment to fund continued expansion and further product development. Leadership emphasizes VR’s immersive social presence and the company’s goal of providing one application with infinite social VR experiences.

• GeoCV

  Participated · Equity · Nov 2016

  GeoCV offers a mobile app for 3D scanning of apartments paired with a cloud processor that stitches scans into navigable 3D models. The resulting models are published to SketchFab and can be experienced in VR using Google Cardboard and other systems. The company hosts virtual apartment fly-throughs on its website with labeled rooms for closer inspection. Founders Anton Yakubenko and Gleb Krivovyaz hold PhDs from the Graphics & Media Lab at Moscow State University and previously worked on research products. GeoCV is part of the Starta Accelerator in New York and plans to launch a usable product next year. Financially, it has raised $700,000 from four investors, including Rothenberg Ventures.

• InsiteVR

  Participated · Seed · Aug 2016

  InsiteVR provides a VR platform that lets customers upload CAD and architectural models and view them on Gear VR, Oculus Rift, or HTC Vive headsets. The product supports collaborative experiences via “asymmetrical VR presentations,” enabling multiple VR users to explore environments while a desktop user directs the session. The company is focused on selling into the architecture and construction markets and positioning its product as a workflow-friendly alternative to consumer-focused VR offerings. InsiteVR traces back to a winning project at the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon and was built out by founders Angel Say and Russell Varriale. The co-founders went through Y Combinator’s winter 2015 batch. The software has been used to host more than 4,000 projects, with around 2,500 architectural models processed for VR, including projects for Unity, Microsoft, and the Philadelphia 30th St. Station redesign. InsiteVR began as Vrban, a project built by Columbia roommates Angel Say and Russell Varriale at the Disrupt NY 2014 Hackathon. The product lets users explore urban environments in virtual reality, enabling architects to visualize new buildings in their surrounding areas before construction. The founders have been tweaking and perfecting the model since the hackathon and aimed the product at both professionals and amateurs. InsiteVR joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2015 class, presented on Demo Day in March, and raised a $120,000 seed round as part of the program. The company already has six contracts in place with architecture firms, branding agencies and an event production company, demonstrating early commercial traction.

• Wave

  Participated · Seed · Aug 2016

  Wave builds virtual concert experiences that have featured artists such as John Legend and The Weeknd, offering immersive live events for artists and fans. The company has struck a partnership with Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME) under which Tencent takes a minority stake. As part of the deal, TME will air Wave experiences across QQ Music, Kugou Music, Kuwo Music and WeSing and collaborate to integrate Wave into TME Live production. Wave plans to use the partnership to bring Western artists on virtual tours in China and to extend its virtual environments into Tencent’s gaming ecosystem. The collaboration also aims to unlock alternative revenue streams for artists—such as in-stream tipping, gifting and merchandising—which are more established in Asian live-streaming markets. Wave’s CEO Adam Arrigo described the move as a step toward enabling global virtual tours and deeper artist monetization through new modalities. Wave develops software and hardware to enable live, virtual reality concerts. The company is based in Los Angeles and is led by CEO Adam Arrigo. On June 10, 2020, Wave said it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round. The Series B was led by Maveron Ventures and Griffin Gaming Partners. The round also included angel investors Alex Rodriguez and Scooter Braun. The article does not disclose operating metrics, past rounds, or a founding year. TheWaveVR builds a persistent, festival‑style virtual reality music app where DJs perform live sets and users teleport around large, stylized venues. Its Wave Builder feature lets users import 3D models, animations and made‑in‑VR content to craft visual experiences that accompany performances. The company has pursued high‑profile activations — including a major SXSW Ready Player One VR concert featuring Warner Brothers IP and a live DJ set — to showcase the format. Leadership says product focus for the year is on how content is created and shared across the platform. TheWaveVR is maintaining a lean cost structure and aims to preserve cash to weather several more years of VR market development amid slower headset sales. Financially, the company completed a $6M Series A and has raised $10M in total to date. TheWaveVR operates a social VR platform that lets users view, host and socialize in virtual music shows worldwide. Music creators can customize how audiences experience performances, while fans can enjoy DJs, musicians and festivals and socialize with friends in VR. The company released a beta on Steam Early Access for PC. Led by CEO Adam Arrigo, TheWaveVR is using its product to connect music fans and creators in novel, immersive ways. The recent financing will be applied to continue expanding the company’s technology platform and capabilities. TheWaveVR builds a social VR platform that lets users experience live music performances together in immersive, customizable virtual venues. The product emphasizes real-time interaction between audience avatars and onstage artists, including gestures like raising a digital lighter and artist reactions. The company positions itself as a “musical metaverse,” enabling creators to alter venues from realistic nightclubs to fantastical spaces and to stage elaborate digital light shows. Early product-market fit is expected in EDM due to the prominence of visual light shows in performances. TheWaveVR envisions private concerts, jam sessions among friends, and shared attendance at major artists’ shows across the globe. The company, led by CEO Adam Arrigo, is six months old and based in Austin, and has begun public testing with events such as a “silent rave” at the VRLA conference in Los Angeles.

• Data.world

  Participated · Series A · Jul 2016

  Data.World is a cloud-native, SaaS enterprise data catalog that maps and documents an organization’s data assets using a knowledge-graph approach to provide semantically organized discovery, governance and analytics. The platform offers data discovery, lineage, metadata indexing, privacy controls (masking/hiding/anonymization), secure data virtualization and monitoring for security and compliance. Data.World has an open-source metadata model and integration toolkit called Kos and plans forthcoming automations for metadata and governance tasks alongside UI enhancements. The company reports more than 1.6 million members across customers including the Associated Press and Penguin Random House, and counts states, counties and local government agencies among its users. Management says the new funding will support global expansion, product innovation and talent acquisition as it pursues greater public-sector traction and broader enterprise adoption. Data.World provides a cloud-native enterprise data catalog and agile data governance solution that maps data to business concepts via a knowledge graph, plus on‑premises tools for inventorying and organizing data across systems. The platform supports metadata ingestion via collection agents, APIs, file transfers, and imports, and lets users save and share queries, analyses, and findings. It includes analytics for discovery, fine-grained permissions, automatic provenance and lineage tracking, and a collaboration dashboard with activity feeds and alerts. The company also operates a large open data community that surpassed one million users and includes members from more than two‑thirds of the Fortune 500. Data.World was co-founded by Brett Hurt (CEO), Bryon Jacob, Jon Loyens, and Matt Laessig; customers named in the article include the Associated Press, CareOregon, and Wunderman Thompson. The company has about 85 employees and has seen quarter‑over‑quarter customer expansion and a doubling of enterprise customers in the past 12 months. Data.World provides a data catalog that maps data to business concepts to create a unified body of knowledge, offering cloud and on-premises management tools for inventorying and organizing enterprise data. The platform lets users save and share queries, analyses, and findings in real time and supports metadata ingestion via agents, APIs, file transfers, and imports. It includes fine-grained permissions, automatic provenance and lineage tracking, and a collaboration dashboard built on a custom knowledge graph and visualization technologies. The company has launched initiatives like a free Coronavirus Data Resource Hub to support COVID-19 research. CEO Brett Hurt says proceeds from the new funding will be used to accelerate data governance efforts and scale to meet demand. Data.World reports quarter-over-quarter customer expansion and new customer acquisition and counts clients including the Associated Press, CareOregon, and Wunderman Thompson. Data.world operates a collaborative data community and enterprise platform that lets teams upload, exchange and catalog datasets and discuss findings internally. The platform integrates with Tableau, Microsoft Excel, Power BI, IBM SPSS, MicroStrategy, Google Data Studio and other analytics tools, and is widely used by journalists. Data.world says its product helps Fortune 500 companies close the “data divide” with digital-native firms by democratizing access to high-quality data. The company recently rolled out an enterprise offering and will use new capital to continue building that product; The Associated Press is a customer. CEO Brett Hurt cites GitHub as an inspiration for democratizing access to data, and the platform has been positioned as a tool for data journalism. Financially, Data.world has raised a total of $45.3M since its 2016 launch, including an $18.7M Series B in February 2017. data.world is a Certified B Corporation and social network for data people that builds a collaborative resource to ease data discovery and collaboration across sectors including health, education, finance, government, public safety, agriculture and weather. Led by co-founder and CEO Brett Hurt, the company offers collaborative workspaces and has launched initiatives such as dwSQL, a new SQL dialect bridging linked data and relational databases. Since its preview launch in July 2016, data.world has introduced core capabilities and projects to drive collaboration within public and private data workspaces. It has powered projects including the White House Opportunity Project workspace, an Anti-Defamation League public workspace, a joint-venture partnership with the U.S. Commerce Department NTIS, the DoD data.mil portal, and publication of metadata for the CIA Crest Archive. The company raised $18.7M in the reported round and has now raised a total of $32.7M. data.world intends to use the funds to continue building its data resource and expand its collaborative capabilities.

No current team members are available.