Why This New VC is Focused Solely on VR and AR
According to founding managing partner and serial entrepreneur Paul Bragiel, Presence Capital was founded to create a healthy pipeline of startups to fuel innovation, creativity, and forward movement within the emerging virtual reality and augmented reality markets.
Founding managing partner Phil Chen originated the Vive project at HTC and brokered the Valve and HTC partnership when he was at that company. He says Presence Capital is looking up and down the hardware and software stack, targeting the most strategic parts to invest and develop at an early stage.
Presence Capital has invested a third of its money into video game companies, which the founders believe will be an early driving force of virtual reality. Founding managing partner Amitt Mahajan co-created Zynga’s FarmVillegame and was an engineer at Epic Games on the Unreal Engine technology and Gears of War game.
Bragiel is already seeing companies driving a lot of the innovation in terms of new use cases for VR and AR. He says Presence Capital is actively looking to invest in enterprise-focused companies to keep balance in its portfolio.
See the full story here: http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/presence-capital-invests-in-vr/
Market research firm PitchBook said that about $4 billion has been invested in virtual reality firms since 2010. The most active has been Rothenberg Ventures and its River virtual reality accelerator, which have made 23 investments, followed by Intel Capital with 10 and Google Ventures with six, PitchBook said.
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