Venture Catalysts leads investment in AR/VR innovator CUSMAT

Venture Catalysts, India’s first, largest and pioneering integrated incubator and accelerator platform, has invested an undisclosed amount in CUSMAT – a startup that builds high immersion training systems for enterprises moving metrics across productivity, safety and customer satisfaction. The seed funding round was led by Venture Catalysts investor – Raveen Sastry of Multiply Ventures. Co-investors Vaibhav Domkundwar, Better Capital, Rakesh Verma Chairman, MapMyIndia, Pratap Atwal, Director, CIPL (coronation Mining& Infra) also participated in the fund raise.

Founded by three NIT Warangal, 2016 graduates Abhinav Ayan (CEO), Anirban Jyoti Chakravorty (CTO) and Soumya ranjan Harichandan (Head of Product), CUSMAT leverages AR/VR/MR and AI-based technologies to skill, upskill, train and assess people in enterprises. The company currently offers 5 training products, catering to more than 15 industries including Logistics, Electronics, Manufacturing, Mining, Steel, Cement, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare, among others.

Sharing his insights, Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, President and Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “CUSMAT is a first-of-its-kind company that is harnessing the power of XR and robotics analytics to upskill, train and assess employees for multiple daily production and high level emergency and accident scenarios. Their marquee products have already garnered significant traction and the company is well-positioned to take the lead in the market. Besides product innovation, we are also impressed by the technical expertise shown by the team. We are confident that CUSMAT will utilize the funding to reach new heights and carve a niche for themselves.”

CUSMAT Founders

Speaking on the fund raise, Abhinav Ayan, CEO, CUSMAT, added, “Our Scalable, Cloud Linked, LMS Integrated platform enables enterprise of all sizes to- standardise Training Processes across setups, locations, plants with capabilities to Track, Compare & Visualise skill specific workforce competency levels and subsequently Develop Learning Track Plans for individuals, based on their current competency levels and organisational needs. We are motivated with the industry feedback and looking to capitalise on this large opportunity with the support of our investors, advisors & partners.”

“AR/VR is at inflection point where it can be used very effectively for multiple use cases. I am very excited to partner with CUSMAT, to solve a very high impact use case in making training accessible, fun and efficient for many industry verticals” said Raveen Sastry of Multiply Ventures, a seasoned entrepreneur turned angel investor.

Venture Catalysts is India’s first integrated incubator. It invests $250K – $1.5 Million in early stage startups that have potential to create enduring value for over a long period of time. Venture Catalysts brings a lethal combination of Capital, Mentoring and Business Network to help investee companies to succeed. Their innovation provides value tostartups through its extensive angel network, funding, community, services and co-working facility.

TNQ Technologies Invests $2 Mn in Immersive Tech Firm InGage, Forms JV 'TNQ InGage'

CHennai-based TNQ Technologies on Wednesday said it has formed a joint venture with InGage, called 'TNQ InGage', and will invest USD 2 million (about Rs 14 crore) into the entity.

InGage will cease to exist as an entity, and its people, intellectual property and customer relationships will fold into this JV, a statement said.

"Apart from its USD 2mn investment, TNQ Technologies will provide management expertise and access to its sales channels for TNQ InGage's growth. TNQ Technologies will continue to focus on its existing publishing client base and will extend the AR/VR expertise of TNQ InGage to them as a new service line," it added.

The solutions will provide enterprises in the healthcare, manufacturing, and construction industries with services like immersive training simulators using Virtual Reality and Haptics, field service tools through Augmented Reality and Internet of Things (IoT) and digital experience centres for Industry 4.0.

InGage is a media creation studio providing creative, live action, motion design, animation and post-production services to entertainment studios, advertising agencies and corporations throughout the world.

According to InGage's LinkedIn company page, the company has launched an multi-brand Augmented Reality Mobile Platform/App called “InGage” on Apple itunes and Android Google Play designed for brands to engage with their customers in an interactive way for all their brand messaging, promotions and other communication.

IIIT Hyderabad Alumni Startup 'DreamVu' Building Omni-Stereo Camera Tech Raises Funds from SRI Capital

California and Hyderabad-based deep technology startup DreamVu Inc. has raised an undisclosed amount in a strategic funding from SRI Capital, an early stage venture capital firm of veteran entrepreneur Sashi Parvatha Reddi.

Founded in 2017 by Rajat Aggarwal and Rohan Bhatial, who are both graduates from International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, DreamVu has developed the world's first omni-stereo camera hardware and software platform for unifying human and machine vision, which means a platform for both human and machine vision.

The startup will use the freshly raised capital to innovate further and also in taking its products to the early adopters as development kits and also use funds for fulfilling its vision of enabling futuristic capturing technologies such as in autonomous machines. In order to disrupt the autonomous guided robotics landscape the startup is selling to and partnering with system integrators worldwide.

The startup has developed a power and cost-efficient omni-directional camera platform inspired by human binocular vision and perception. It helps in providing augmented navigation capabilities and a full scene-understanding of unconfined and dynamic environments to autonomous robots.

The start was also a part of AVISHKAR Deep Tech Accelerator, a DeepTech early stage accelerator at IIIT-Hyderabad Foundation.

DreamVu platform's 7D output enables live VR streaming and preview, seamless localization and mapping, and object tracking to name a few. We capture 4D light field function into a single sensor, which simplifies the processing pipeline.

[caption id="attachment_127534" align="aligncenter" width="732"] PAL - A 3 360° depth sensor developed by DreamVu
[Image - dreamvu.com/][/caption]

The startup aims to revolutionize the way reality is being captured with by applying its its camera technology in a wide range of verticals including VR, AR to autonomous machines (vehicles, drones and robots) to smart invasive systems.

Jay Krishnan, partner at SRI Capital, said, "SRI Capital is committed to backing startups with IP in areas that form the frontiers of new technologies. We were thrilled to see DreamVu’s solution with an optics- first approach that allows sensors and optics to disrupt value chains long powered by electronics and software. DreamVu is well positioned to transform the autonomous guided space with its product- portfolio and stellar backing through its advisers, investors and the operating team."

Krishnan, who was earlier the CEO at T-Hub, the largest startup accelerator in Hyderabad, has recently joined SRI Capital in October.

"We are privileged to have partnered with a startup born here in Hyderabad and formed by young and ingenious entrepreneurs. We are positive that the value we provide in addition to this investment will significantly accelerate DreamVu’s growth curve in new markets," added Jay Krishnan.

DreamVu is the second firm from IIIT-Hyderabad in which SRI Capital has invested. SRI Capital had launched its maiden $100 million technology focused fund in July to invest in startups in US and India. In the last five years, SRI Capital has invested in 36 startups.

[Top Featured Image - Facebook.com/dreamvu.inc/]

Source - Telangana Today

Only 5% AR/VR Startups in India Raised Any Funding in Last 5 Years

In past few years there has been an quite a good emergence of 170 Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) startups in India, 60% of which launched in the past 24 months. Bengaluru takes the lead, attracting 27% of these startups, followed by Delhi at 25% and Mumbai at 13%, according to a Market Pulse Report on AR and VR, by GrowthEnabler, a data and intelligence firm on disruptive technology/digital startups.

Various industry estimates peg the global AR/VR market at $100-120 billion by 2021.

According to a Market Pulse Report on AR and VR, by GrowthEnabler, a data and intelligence firm on disruptive technology/digital startups, in the world across the AR segment has received $2.5 billion in funding, and VR $2.7 billion.

“In India, of the 100 AR startups, only 5% have received any form of capital investment of $1-1.5 million. Of the 70 VR start-ups, only a handful have raised any seed/angel capital. Even the top 15 AR/VR start-ups that GrowthEnabler has identified based on over 50 parameters, have collectively raised under $3 million in funding. But all that is going to change in the next five years,” Banda said.

The Karnataka governmnet is actively promoting AR/VR start-ups by providing incubation, mentoring, idea validation by experts, opportunities to deploy pilots with various departments, along with fund support for eligible ones. “We have around 50 start-ups in the AR/VR space in our physical and virtual incubation programmes” said Priyank Kharge, Karnataka IT Minister.

Despite of all this however there's a good news for all AR/VR startups in India that Indian AR/VR market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 76% over the next five years, fuelled by demand from business and consumer sectors.

The above report was first published in Business Line.

A couple of months back only, Bengaluru based AR-enabled interactive educational games startup Play Shifu has raised funding of undisclosed amounf in a pre-Series A round led by IDG Ventures and IDFC-Parampara Fund and, in the same month, followed by $500,000 funding of Kalpnik Technologies, which is a virtual reality-driven spiritual startup.

Prior to this, famous West Indies cricketer Chris Gayle had too invested in a Bangalore based AR startup FlippAR.

In October 2017, another VR & AR startup GridRaster has a raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of venture capital firms.

In May 2017, Chymera VR Inc, a virtual reality advertising platform, had secured funding from a clutch of angel investors, including People Group founder and chief executive Anupam Mittal, Airbnb’s global expansion head Varsha Rao, Google executive Surojit Chatterjee, and HHC Holdings chairman Nirav Choksi.

VR/AR Startup GridRaster Raises $2 Million Seed Funding

Palo Alto and Bengaluru-based virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) firm GridRaster has a raised a whopping $2 million in seed funding.

The funds were raised from a group of venture capital firms, which included Exfinity Ventures, Lumia Capital, Pipeline Capital, NexStar Partners, Unshackled Ventures and Explorer Group.

GridRaster provides the underlying compute and network stack to power high-end VR/AR experiences on mobile platforms by leveraging the edge cloud. The solution provides high-performance graphics with ultra-low latency while hugely improving battery performance. The technology drives mass adoption of VR/AR by dramatically improving the reach of exciting content and bringing breathtaking new experiences to users.

GridRaster technology works seamlessly with existing VR content creation technologies such as Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.

The capital raised will be used by the firm for product development and marketing.

“With new capital, we will work towards maturing the product for specific enterprise and customer use cases as we continue to establish GridRaster as a standard platform of choice for cloud-powered high-end VR/AR. We will also look towards strengthening our development team,” said Rishi Ranjan, founder, GridRaster, in a statement.

Founded by ex-Qualcomm employees Rishi Ranjan, Dijam Panigrahi and Venkata Ramana Dass, who are also alumni of Georgia Tech, and IIT Kharagpur, GridRaster claims to process high-end graphics 10 times faster than other stand-alone mobile AR/VR platforms currently out there in the world.

The firm has a team which has deep expertise in computer graphics, cloud computing, wireless infrastructure, video, mobile and software development with 10+ patents. It is currently working on ways of defining future of VR/AR infrastructure for mass adoption.

This development was first reported in TheDealStreetAsia.

[Image: OurCrowd]

Indian-Origin Founder's Startup Raises UK's Biggest VC Funding Deal

In an impressive piece of news coming from the UK, a British technology startup co-founded by an Indian-origin entrepreneur has achieved the admirable feet of reaching more than a USD 1 billion valuation after it recently raised a whopping USD 502 million in a Series B funding round, led by SoftBank. The funding is being deemed as one of the largest venture capital deals in the whole of United Kingdom.

Starting its journey in 2012, Improbable is a virtual reality tech firm, which focuses on large-scale simulations in the cloud, enabling virtual worlds of unprecedented scale and complexity. The startup is a result of hard work of Indian origin Herman Narula (CEO) and his Cambridge University friend, Rob Whitehead (CTO). They are joined in the journey by Peter Lipka (COO), who is an Imperial College graduate and worked at Goldman Sachs prior to launching Improbable.

The London headquartered startup has gained immense success in a period of just 5 years and now has nearly 200 employees, with offices in London and San Francisco.

With a mission of powering previously unmakeable games and answering previously unanswerable questions that can lead to a better functioning world, Improbable makes use of cloud-based computing to create virtual worlds for use in games as well as large-scale simulations of the real world.

During its 5-years journey, Improbable has always been supported by some of the largest and most visionary investors in the world. In March 2015, Improbable received $20m in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz. In July 2015, a follow-on Series A investment saw Horizons Ventures lead a $30m funding round, with Temasek, the Singaporean investment company, contributing $5m.

However, the USD 502 million Series B funding round led by SoftBank, a Japanese telecoms and technology firm, is being considered as the largest ever funds injection in a European tech startup till date. SoftBank has decided to put its managing director Deep Nishar on Improbable's board and will have only a minority stake in the startup's business.

According to Narula, the startup's Series B funding round reflects the potential size and importance of the market for this next generation of games and, how massive- scale virtual worlds could become fundamental to how the society functions, in the near future.

The startup has decided to utilise the funding received to develop the company's Spatial OS operating system and to hire more people in its offices in London and San Francisco.

11 Promising Virtual Reality Startups in India Right Now

Virtual reality is currently one of the hottest talks of the town. The technology, which has the potential of becoming a major aspect of future technology, offers its users a three-dimensional, computer generated environment which can be explored and interacted with by the person. The person becomes a part of this virtual world or is immersed within this environment for a brief period of time and, is able to manipulate objects or perform a series of actions whilst there.

Seeing the attention Virtual reality is garnering in India, a number of companies here are working on the concept and coming up with their own products focused around Virtual reality. Here's a list of 10 Virtual reality startups in India that are currently meticulously working towards changing the way humans interact with computers.

SmartVizX

Started with an aim of eliminating barriers between the real and the unreal world, SmartVizX prides itself on being one of the highest funded startups in the Virtual reality category. The startup, which offers a wide variety of interactive and immersive VR solutions across devices such as desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile etc., has also been named 'Start-up of The Week’ in the recent past by NASSCOM under its much famous 10000 start-ups initiative.

At SmartVizX, the mission is to disrupt the traditional decision-making process and buying behavior by creating Virtual Reality solutions for Businesses. They're currently catering to the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. The startup's products VIZ, ARCH-VIZ, ARCH-VIZ (Mobile) etc., offer innovative features such as, interactive walk-through of an entire project, actual simulation of sun's light in a particular room of the project during any particular time of the day, a view of immediate surroundings from balconies and other vantage points from the project etc. Hence, the customer can get to experience a realistic simulation, of how their property would turn out to be.

Grey Kernel

Being one of India's first VR-based startup, Grey Kernel's “IRA VR”, which was the startup's flagship product, has become the most successful Indian VR product on Google Play store. The startup hosts in-house developed content and also the content its curates from several Indian/International Virtual Reality studios.

Taking birth in the year 2015, Grey Kernel's first Virtual Reality demo for Oculus Rift DK2 landed a place in RoadToVR, which is considered as one of the top most International VR e-journals. Gaining momentum from this feat, the company was successfully able to pull of an International VR project.

Whereas most of the India based VR production Studios are currently focusing their attention on creating Monoscopic 360 degree videos, this particular startup is a front-runner in the space. It has been able to achieve this pedestal by creating Stereoscopic/Interactive Virtual reality content and being able to solve engineering/distribution for their clients that are into media & publishing, real estate and marketing agencies.

Merxius

Founded by college friends Vaishali Neotia and Hasan Ali Khan in 2011, Merxius (mer-she-us) is both Augmented & Virtual Reality company from Hyderabad. Merxius has created a flagship product - RealSim Editor, or RED which the founders call it Photoshop for Virtual Reality. With RED anyone who has a 3D model can import it into this platform and in one click, can get virtual reality (VR) out of it. The RED tool is currently being tested by the Indian Armed Forces to create a training module for engine maintenance.

The startup, which is yet to raise funds, was recently added to the list of top 10 deep tech companies by IBM SmartCamp and has also been selected for a Tata Elxsi incubation programme.

Xenium

Founded in the year 2007, Xenium started contributing to the VR scene in India only in 2014. The startup firmly believes that VR has the potential of providing researchers with tools to accelerate scientific discovery, businesses with new visualization techniques and developers with fresh creative insights. The VR venture had been started even when wireless headgear like Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift etc. were not available in the Indian Market after their release.

The firm has been credited for being the fourth company in the world and the first in India to have successfully attempted doing a live streaming using Virtual Reality. Complete VR systems and application development are among many of the services being provided by the startup. Xenium's virtual reality solutions are known to cater to the needs of both enterprises and in academics as it paves the way for enhanced communication and innovation.

Tesseract Inc.

The startup managed to put itself on world's Virtual Reality map by inventing the first 360 Virtual Reality Camera ever. With Tesseract, the founder, Kshitij's dream is to able to empower everyone with the ability to capture their precious memories in 360 and VR, and relive them as if they were in the same moment back again.

With its hardware/software designed, innovated, and manufactured out of India, Tesseract's plan is to completely transform the way humans record, consume and share content currently.

Tesseract's Methane 360 VR is a hit in the travel and real-estate world and is being currently employed by big companies like Grabhouse, MakeMyTrip and Nestaway etc. It's latest invention is a consumer grade 360 Virtual Reality Camera – ViCAM, which is being termed as the world’s smallest 360 Virtual Reality Camera.

Trimensions

Based out of the capital city New Delhi, the award-winning digital services and UX design agency has been able to carve a space for itself both in the Indian virtual and augmented reality space. It is working across a wide range of verticals which includes enterprise, education and entertainment.

By focusing its energies on good, clear design and user experience, Trimensions aims to bring new exciting technologies within the reach of the common man in India. Its name is famous in the industry for developing innovative new approaches to train people. The startup is also into 360 video production and VR for training simulations and AR for machine maintenance.

Look Mobility

Started in 2015, Look is a Bengaluru-based startup founded by Ashwin Krishnan. It is essentially a flexible and powerful development platform for creating multi-platform 3D virtual reality interactive experiences for Android and Google Cardboard and a complete ecosystem for anyone who aims to build a business on creating high-end content and connecting to their most loyal and enthusiastic players and customers. Apart from this, The startup has solution for the content consuming part of the platform as it has created its own world's first flat foldable VR headsets called foloVR.

Still in a nascent stage, this startups look promising because of its offerings & solution which is unique in Indian market as not many startups are working in VR development platform as far as India is concerned.

Meraki

The country's first Virtual Reality content production studio for consumers as well as businesses, Meraki was founded a year ago by Arvind Ghorwal, Parth Choksi, Agam Garg and Sairam Sagiraju.

With an illustrious client list which includes names such as Star Sports, Network 18, Percept Pictures and Channel V, Meraki is currently into creating 360 degree films for experiential marketing, real estate, events, tourism, sports, adventure, advertisements, weddings, news and fiction.

Imaginate

Conceived and executed in November 2011 by Hemanth Satyanarayana, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and Indian School of Business, Imaginate Technologies, Inc is not just a virtual reality startup but an augmented reality startup too. Its flagship VR product called NuSpace can be used in industrial training and collaborative design, from a manufacturing point of view. Its technology can be used to provide customised VR and AR solutions to those in the retail, healthcare, defence, education and entertainment segments, among others.

The Hyderabad-based startup is backed by venture fund SRI Capital which invested Rs 3.35 crore ($500,000) as seed fund in the startup recently.

GazeMatic

Based out of Bangalore, GazeMatic has built a reputation for itself in the VR world by building “THE CALLER”, a mobile app for Virtual Reality. A first of its kind voice caller app, "THE CALLER" can help the user teleport himself when they are on a call with their friend. The app has found instantaneous success since its launch and has managed to score users in US, UK, Germany, Russia along with India.

Founded by Karthikeyan NG and MohanRaj MS in the year 2015, GazeMatic has become a hub of all the De-facto companies in the startup ecosystem of India in just one year. Thanks

AbsentiaVR

Founded in June 2015, by BITS Pilani, Goa dropouts Shubham Mishra, Vrushali Prasade and Harikrishna Valiyath, AbsentiaVR has been able to carve a place for itself in the VR startup world with its highly innovative virtual reality headset called Tesseract. The headset wishes to provide users an incremental experience in the newest available format i.e the 3-D virtual reality.

The founders decided to come together and startup AbsentiaVR upon realizing the grave need to bridge the gulf between existing virtual reality and electronic content.

[Top-most Image - Shutterstock]