The Venture Reality Fund Releases 1H 2017 European Virtual Reality Landscape in Partnership with LucidWeb
The Venture Reality Fund (“The VR Fund”), a leading global venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in the augmented, virtual and mixed reality (AR/VR/MR) spaces, today released its second European VR landscape. The report, covering activity in the first half of this year, features dozens of companies developing infrastructure, tools, platforms and apps for the booming VR ecosystem. The landscape, created in partnership with the French VR and WebVR consulting and development agency LucidWeb, depicts growth in the ecosystem, increased investment and rising international impact.
The European VR landscape is based on extensive research, information gathered during meetings with regional VR ambassadors and through attending the top VR-focused conferences. The VR Fund and LucidWeb added 68 companies to the latest report, increasing the total number featured to 188.
“The VR industry continues to expand in Europe and next to the U.K. and France, Sweden has caught up in terms of the number of high-performing startups across the industry,” said Leen Segers, co-founder and CEO at LucidWeb. “For sub-industries in VR, as with the first version of the EU VR landscape published in early February, the number of companies focusing on user input, 3D tools and enterprise applications are growing quickly. Additionally, young startups in these verticals have easy access to capital, while mature companies in these spaces are more likely to go public or become acquired by major companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Starbreeze.”
“We partnered with LucidWeb again for this landscape because of its invaluable insight into the European VR ecosystem and its strong database of VR startups,” said Tipatat Chennavasin, co-founder and general partner at The VR Fund. “This landscape shows the robust startup environment and we are excited about new innovations emerging from virtually every country in Europe.”
The semi-annual European VR landscape, as well as The VR Fund’s global VR and AR industry landscapes, are available at http://www.thevrfund.com/ within the “Resources” section.
Highlights from the 1H 2017 European VR landscape:
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The total number of companies featured in the landscape increased by 57 percent over 2H 2016.
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Consistent with the findings of the first EU VR landscape, the U.K. leads with the largest number of companies overall; France continues to lead VR development on continental Europe.
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Gaming remains the most competitive category across Europe; 29 companies are featured, up 38 percent from the 2H 2016 report.
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Enterprise VR technologies continues to gain steam; the number of companies within this category increased by 55 percent during 1H 2017.
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There were only two new additions to the Hardware category and fewer entrants overall during 1H 2017. This is a reflection of the market focusing on technology companies driving and improving headsets (input tools) and the process of capturing/post processing (3D tools, reality capture).
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Education is an evolving sector across Europe; nearly twice as many companies were identified in this category during 1H 2017, as compared to 2H 2016.
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A new Advertising category was added to the landscape due to an increasing number of startups in this sector.
More information and a complete list of Europe’s fastest growing VR companies is detailed on LucidWeb’s public Trello.
About The Venture Reality Fund
The Venture Reality Fund (“The VR Fund”) is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) spaces. The firm invests globally in innovative companies across a wide variety of sectors from infrastructure and development tools to content and applications, to help entrepreneurs bring industry-defining technology to market faster. The firm’s first exit success, Owlchemy Labs, was finalized within The VR Fund’s first year of operation.
As part of its commitment to educating and strengthening the ecosystem, The VR Fund publishes industry insights including quarterly global VR and AR landscapes detailing the market’s growth, new investments and increased international impact. It is also a proud partner of the Women in XR initiative, which connects female founders and women-led businesses to capital and resources.
For more information, please visit TheVRFund.com, like The VR Fund on Facebook and follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.
About LucidWeb
LucidWeb is a Brussels based VR and WebVR consulting and software development company. LucidWeb offers consulting services (inspirational and/or technical ateliers), next to offering a premium distribution platform based upon the WebVR technology called “LucidWeb Pro,” targeting content creators/publishers/
For more information, please visit www.lucidweb.pro, like LucidWeb on Facebook, LinkedIn and follow on Twitter
