The VR Owl Group has officially acquired MeetinVR, with the Group replacing the company’s CEO with Incoming Chief Executive, Wisse Jelgersma, it announced on Thursday.
The firm noted that MeetinVR would maintain its current operations, “ensuring a top-notch meeting platform for its valued customers.”
Jelgersma said in a company statement,
“MeetinVR is the leading solution that brings colleagues and customers closer together in an innovative and engaging way. The last 10 years I have been working in the VR industry in various technical roles and always saw MeetinVR as a great example. The work Cristian-Emanuel Anton and his team has done in the past years has been amazing and I’m looking forward to take MeetinVR into the next phase of growth. The coming period will be all about meeting partners, suppliers and clients of MeetinVR”
VR Owl Group will also continue to “invest in its software and provide optimal service” to clients and partners, it added in the announcement.
Formed in Utrecht, The Netherlands, the VR Owl Group employs dozens of people across the country and Germany. It consists of the following:
- Project agency VR Owl
- VR Expert, Europe’s biggest XR hardware reseller
- VR Owl Labs, a major software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution provider for SMEs
Responding to the acquisition, Cristian-Emanuel Anton, Founder, MeetinVR, shocked followers on social media after announcing he would leave MeetinVR, the extended reality (XR) company he founded.
MeetinVR Founder Bids Adieu to Followers
In a social media post, Anton reflected on his work with the XR business software platform, which he began eight years ago in 2005.
“Goodbye, MeetinVR! Words cannot express what an amazing ride it has been,” he said.
He also listed milestones and explained that MeetinVR had become “one of the world’s first and leading” XR collaboration platforms.
MeetinVR had also introduced “thousands” to the “transformative experience of XR meetings.” This has included companies like VMware, Takeda, Teleperformance, Stanford University, and many others.
Anton later thanked the people who had “been part of this journey,” including his teams, colleagues, and other associates.
“No one could have ever prepared me for the incredible highs and lows one experiences when building something with full passion, love, and dedication. From the intense highs of being at the center of the tech world in the midst of the pandemic to having to make extremely tough decisions to avoid losing everything your team has been building for years. So many lessons learned, so many incredible people met along the way, friendships forged and sometimes broken, and many sacrifices made but all of them are worth it when you get to sit down with your colleagues, look back and think ‘Wow, we’ve built all that!'”
AltSpaceVR Reincarnated as Microsoft Mesh
The news comes after AltSpace VR announced in January it would shutter its services in March this year. The closure comes after a mass wave of layoffs across Microsoft’s global operations.
Launched in AltspaceVR, its then-CEO, Eric Romo, left the company to join Meta Platforms as its Director of Product, Reality Labs Social Experiences, up to 2022.
Microsoft acquired AltspaceVR in 2017 under its mixed reality (MR) department. However, following the layoffs, the announcement noted that Microsoft would replace the platform with Microsoft Mesh, its in-house MR solution.
