The worlds of virtual and augmented reality have yet to land on the applications and hardware to truly spark mass-market, consumer interest in the space, but meanwhile a startup building mixed reality services for business users has raised a round of funding, underscoring the opportunity in enterprise.
Spatial, which has developed a “holographic” collaboration platform that people use to speak and work together in virtual rooms through the use of strikingly effective avatars — think: a supercharged, virtual reality version of Zoom or a Google Hangout — is today announcing that it has raised $14 million, a Series A that it will be using to continue building out the functionality of its application and its interoperability with a wider range of hardware, as well as to start looking at how it can turn its tech into a platform that could be used by others, for example by way of an SDK.
The funding is being led by WhiteStar Capital, iNovia and Kakao Ventures, with participation from Baidu and individual investors, Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger and Zynga’s Mark Pincus, also participating. Together with Spatial’s last round, $8 million in October 2018, the company has now raised $22 million. It’s not disclosing valuation at this stage, Anand Agarawala, the CEO who co-founded the company with Jinha Lee (CPO), said in an interview.
Other investors include Expa, Lerer Hippeau, Leaders Fund, Samsung NEXT and Andy Hertzfeld (of Macintosh fame).