High Fidelity Gets New $22 Million Investment to Grow Virtual Reality Platform

Update, December 9: Bumped up for weekend discussion and sharing!

High Fidelity just got a major investment of $22 million, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday but didn't get much notice, since it was listed deep in a roundup of Form D regulatory filings.

"Investment was led by IDG Capital and new investor Jim Breyer / Breyer Capital," High Fidelity founder and CEO Philip Rosedale just confirmed to me."We'll have more to say as we get farther along with the beta!"

$22 million is a pretty big cash infusion; in terms of burn rate, you could, say, hire over 200 new employees for a year with that kind of money (or 100 for two). Looks like High Fidelity is aiming for a major push at the mass market now.

Also interesting when you look at what companies this new investor, Breyer Capital, has in its portfolio:

Marvel and the movie developer Legendary (Dark Knight, Interstellar, other massive hit). So also looks like Philip's new investor sees the consumer entertainment appeal to High Fidelity -- not to mention VR.

Hat tip: Robert Scoble. Image via Wired.

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Comments

[Carlos Loff]

Spend it on server quality so every first user gets hooked, I tried it and it was hyper-super desperately laggy

[cyberserenity]

The everybody going to have their own server does not work.. Rethink.

[JohnC]

Maybe with all this money they can try to find a fix for the most simple and pathetic form of griefing that seems to be there right from the start.
Sickening to watch for any regular SL user, but very revealing of the simple vulnerabilities that have been around since day on in SL, and have as yet no solutions it seem, correct me if I am wrong. Surly a simple collision system that does not allow another avatar to crash straight into your own is needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky-m7vCs--8

[sirhc deSantis]

Rosedale always had the magic touch when it came to funding :)

JohnC - search the hifi forums for "personal space bubble" its coming 'real soon now' as of about 2 and a bit weeks back, might even be incorporated now.

[JohnC]

sounds good

[Clara Seller]

"$22 million is a pretty big cash infusion". No. It's enough money, in the hands of the right person, to build a platform to blow us all away. In fact it may be too much money.

Philip Rosedale had his shot a long time ago. This is the thing that frustrates me about America and our worship of money. It tends to prop up failures who are sleezy salespeople. I'm afraid this will be just a big cash bath for a small group of people to play in until it dries up and then we will all believe this is the best we can do.

Sorry, I just believe that there are better ideas out there and much more inspiring minds to invest in. This shouldn't be a payday, but an opportunity to launch brilliance. Sorry , when I look at High Fidelity I don't see brilliance. I see tinkering that when I actually try to use it, I can't wait to escape.

I would use that 22 million as a carrot and I would go to universities and make this a contest. I'd evaluate the best concepts and then invest in making that realization happen. My God, we've all been reading about High Fidelity for a long time and a project worthy of 22 million... we should all be peeing our pants in excitement to get our hands on using it. But seriously, it's about as exciting as a new flavor of Doritos.

[Avatar Farts Generator]

Agreeing with Clara 100% it's going on near 5 years since he announced high fidelity.

Second Life will be around strong 5 years from now as the lindens has a small team
re-documenting/Rewritten the entire code base while merging in current improvements that should keep everything mostly from breaking once they launch it on the grid in a few years as they introduce the next generation of content and tools for builders.

Sansar is targeted towards Business first, will offer more opportunity as the platform develops.

[space] offers little more then a graphics upgrade at the expense of things.

High Fidelity really has no clue were it is going while the founder is waiting on some massive break in technology that the platform can ride off of until then it is a lot of mouth action AND A MOVE AWAY FROM OPEN SOURCE.

Opensim will always ride linden labs jockstring.