AR/VR advisor Digi-Capital has released a financial report on the state of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality development, revealing that AR/VR investment records were broken last year as startups raised over $3 billion across 28 AR/VR categories.
While VR and AR still lack that killer application, it appears that investors are still willing to bet large on their future with more than $.15 billion investments poured in the last 3 months of 2017 alone.
The – which was prepared by Tim Merel, Managing Director of AR/VR advisor Digi-Capital – revealed that the AR-focused Magic Leap pulled just about 20% of all AR/VR investment funds in 2017.
Some of the most interesting insights of the report include:
"Scalable immersive worlds tech developer Improbable (now that’s ironic) raising half a billion dollars, and graphics engine developer Unity taking in another $200 million.
Smartglasses took just under a fifth of all the money raised, dominated by the latest Magic Leap monster round of half a billion dollars. Mobile AR games leader Niantic (of Pokémon Go fame) raised $200 million, which helped the games category take a bit over one-tenth of the cash. Smaller AR/VR games developers raised nearly 40 early stage rounds in Niantic’s wake, so well done Pikachu.
Other categories taking single digit percentage shares of the funds were AR/VR photo/video, navigation, peripherals, location-based, lifestyle, social and entertainment. However the scale of investments in those sectors was not the same as the big three of AR/VR tech, smartglasses and games.
Smaller AR/VR investment categories taking tens of millions of dollars each were VR headsets, education, advertising/marketing, medical, music, utilities and solutions/services. Single digit million dollar categories were AR/VR business, news, eCommerce, travel/transport, art/design, enterprise and sports."
You can read the full report .
