This week at MWC Shanghai, HTC announced the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA), a consortium of 28 venture capital firms focusing their funds on virtual reality. Collectively, the group represents more than $10 billion in capital aimed at growing the VR industry.

VR has become one of the hottest themes in tech investment in the last few years. We noted late last year that there was more than $136 million investments made in the VR space in November 2015 alone, and, according to VR market intelligence firm Greenlight VR, the industry saw $900 million invested in total through 2015.

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And it looks like things are only continuing to grow. HTC announced this week the VRVCA, a consortium of venture capital firms who collectively have $10 billion ready to funnel into the VR industry (including the related technologies of augmented and mixed reality). The group is headed by HTC’s China Regional President of VR, Alvin Wang Graylin.

Mind you, this massive sum of cash is not yet disbursed, it is the claimed aggregate of the group’s deployable capital. In that way, the VRVCA seems mostly like a show of force and conviction by the collective that VR is destined to change the way we work, play, and communicate.

“This is the first time such renowned VCs are joining hands at this scale to drive the future of a new industry, rather than competing to find the best deals for themselves,” said Graylin who heads the VRVCA. “The disruption potential of VR on the world is hard to ignore and the VRVCA itself is a form of innovation in the financial industry to deal with its impact.”

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Among the 28 venture capital firms of the VRVCA is some of the world’s most senior VC firms, including Sequoia Capital (1972) and Matrix Partners (1977) who, between just the two of them, have raised some $5.82 billion in capital over the years and have seen 66 IPOs, according to Crunchbase.

The VRVCA says they’ll meet every two months in Beijing and San Francisco and are actively accepting pitches. The group is interested in funding seed to pre-IPO companies working on “Industry vertical applications (enterprise, healthcare, education, social, events etc), content (gaming, VR movies, streaming etc), base technologies, tools, platforms, infrastructure/hardware, peripherals, accessories… anything with potential or traction.”

See Also: HTC Just Earmarked $100 Million to Invest in VR Content, Applications Open Today
See Also: HTC Just Earmarked $100 Million to Invest in VR Content, Applications Open Today

The announcement of the alliance comes shortly after HTC announced their Vive X accelerator which, itself part of the VRVCA, previously announced a $100 million inaugural fund targeting virtual reality technology.

HTC says the first group of companies to join the Vive X accelerator will be announced in July after having received some 1,200 applications to the program, more than 50% of which came from China. The second Vive X batch will open in November, 2016 and kickoff in January 2017.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • I *REALLY* need to get my VR project out there!

    • ummm…

      what is it?

      • It’s a VR Toybox. It has destroyable objects, guns, physics devices, and a shooting mini-game. I’m in the process of adding monster mini-game.

    • DiGiCT Ltd

      You need to show what you can do, without anything you get nothing.

      • I’ve been posting videos of my work on YouTube, and offering a demo to anyone interested in downloading it. Once I get a bit more done, I’m going to attempt to put it up on Steam. YouTube video from last month, with link in the description. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYtJlhczAZk

        • DiGiCT Ltd

          It doesnt look that bad for a start, although still a lot of tweaking need to be done as you should keep a minimum of 90 fps in VR.
          Why not just submit it to HTC ViveX, maybe you be selected.
          Not every project gets trough, but the ones they select will.
          No idea what exactly your problem is as your progress is showing off nicely already.
          It’s a sandbox still, they might want to see some early gameplay so they can unserstand what the game itself is about.
          Keep up the good work !

          • In my first project for the Oculus Rift, using the Unreal 4 Engine, I got low framerates and was discouraged from releasing it by forum people who themselves were aiming for 90fps on GeForce 9600. Their opinion was that good VR had to be minimalist.

            Then Oculus announces it’s official minimum specs as 9800GTX. Oculus themselves tossed out the old bar and set the new one REALLY high! Their own Farlands game makes my demo look like a gazelle in framerate. And if that wasn’t enough, Epic also improved the UE4 engine for better framerates.

            The lesson learned is that framerate issues are always self diminishing.

          • DiGiCT Ltd

            I use as well UE4 as unity 5 for my projects.
            The 90 FPS is there to keep away motion sickness and you can easy get framedrops if you move your head very fast.
            As by doing that the renderer need to work harder.
            Slow pass games can play with lower fps but when user goes frenzy in your game you better have the 90FPS.
            Hope it help you.

          • You tried my demo?

          • DiGiCT Ltd

            No sorry, just watched the video which was enough for me to know what you did.
            I am over 40 years old and my first game was the pong! machine on TV.
            Nearly any game machine i experienced in my life and played thousands of games.
            Based on a video I already can estimate a lot how it is to play it.
            On the other hand i know how to create it too.

            I think your game will be people willing to play, it just still has things to solve though.
            Nowadays people want to see 2 things in a game.
            1. How you play the game. That means you need to shoot NPC or Players in the video, not just picking up stuff and shooting in the air.
            2. Visuals, even more important in VR as the better the art the more immersed people will feel.
            Consumers buy VR because they want to feel how it is to be in the game world itself.
            The downside is for a developer that any issues will impact the end user even more as a non VR game due to breaking the VR feeling.
            For example texture density, video lag, network lag and loading screens.
            It takes a different approach to make a good VR game and it cost much more efford and time to make one.
            There are already some games released similar to yours, although most of them have low poly art which makes it more a mobile game for me.
            There is still a lot of opportunity as most games in the market are not good enough for VR.
            The problem in most cases is that developers did not reset their mind but work on their previous experience and knowledge.
            The same error the time they start making mobile games forgetting this device could not render as much as a PC and reducing the game capabilities.
            VR is different, the best ideas come from thinking from scratch not porting something out of old games to VR.
            I am willing to test the game when its more mature or even finished, prototypes and demos i went trough a lot already, including my own.