VR/AR Data Visualization and Analytics Pioneer, Virtualitics, Raises $4.4 Million Series A

Virtualitics, Inc., a transformative startup developing next-generation big data visualization and analytics tools for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) environments, today announced it has raised $4.4 million in a Series A funding round led by The Venture Reality Fund (The VR Fund).

Virtualitics will leverage the investment to expand its team and accelerate the deployment of new functionality within its platform, which combines VR/AR data visualization, artificial intelligence, natural language and machine learning to identify multidimensional relationships and actionable knowledge hidden in complex datasets. “The VR Fund is among the most active and experienced investors in this sectorand its team understands the intrinsic value in evolving the way we explore, interact with and understand complex datasets,” said Michael Amori, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Virtualitics. “Our technology enables organizations of all sizes, across any sector, to more effectively identify meaningful patterns in data that can lead to better business outcomes, cost savings and significant competitive advantage.”

Virtualitics’ intuitive platform enables users to leverage the immersive properties of VR to examine up to 10 dimensions of data in a shared virtual office, which provides a collaborative environment for visual data exploration and analysis. The use of 3D environments is well-suited for human perception, intuition and pattern recognition, leading to insights that would be difficult to garner through traditional methods of analysis.

The company possesses a pedigree of more than a decade of advanced research at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a founding team of pioneers and luminaries in data analysis, data visualization, machine learning and mixed reality applications including:

• Professor George Djorgovski, the founding director of Caltech’s Center for Data-Driven Discovery. Djorgovski also serves as the Department Chair for Astronomy at Caltech and was one of the founders of the Virtual Observatory framework, which is now a global data grid of astronomy, as well as of the emerging field of Astroinformatics. He was also the Director of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics, the first professional scientific organization based in Virtual Worlds.
• Michael Amori, a Harvard MBA alumnus and former managing director at Deutsche Bank, where he oversaw a large trading group and established its data science and risk management systems. Amori was also a researcher in nanotechnology at Caltech, where he contributed to multiple papers and obtained a patent for his work.
• Dr. Ciro Donalek, a computational scientist at Caltech with more than 15 years of experience in machine learning. He’s authored numerous publications on artificial intelligence and has pioneered several uses of VR for immersive data visualization and machine learning.
• Dr. Scott Davidoff, manager of the Human Interfaces Group at NASA’s JPL, where he oversees design and development of the user interfaces that command all JPL spacecraft in addition to leading the team that created Virtual Mars.

“Virtualitics is harnessing the power of VR/AR and artificial intelligence to present and analyze big data in an unprecedented way,” said Marco DeMiroz, Co-founder and General Partner at The VR Fund. “The company’s platform is truly transformative and can be applied to any industry that relies heavily on data analytics, representing tremendous market opportunity on a global scale.”

Virtualitics is currently in private beta, with participants including Accenture and Efficient Power Conversion. For more information or to request a demo, please visit www.virtualitics.com.

About Virtualitics, Inc.

Virtualitics, Inc. is a data visualization company based in Pasadena, California, that merges artificial intelligence, Big Data and virtual/augmented reality to gain insights from big and complex data sets. Its data exploration, collaborative environment is suitable for both data scientists and non-expert users and reveals multidimensional relationships present in the data, which may not be discoverable in any other way. The company is based on over a decade of research at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and was founded by: professor George Djorgovski, the founding director of Caltech’s Center for Data-Driven Discovery; Michael Amori, former Deutsche Bank managing director, Harvard MBA and Caltech alumnus; Dr. Ciro Donalek, computational scientist at Caltech; and Dr. Scott Davidoff, manager of the Human Interfaces Group at NASA’s JPL.

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. 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.