In an effort to foster growth in early-stage virtual reality content companies looking to build momentum, today GREE announced the $12 million GVR Fund.
The fund is primarily aimed at VR content companies, and Teppei Tsutsui, Managing Director at GREE VR Capital, tells me that he’s hoping to have the fund approach gaming and non-gaming VR companies fairly evenly.
“Our experience in working with major industry players such as Oculus, Samsung, HTC and Google prove that we have the expertise and relationships to make a significant impact in the market,” said Tsutsui.
The company has a pretty solid history on mobile and is thus particularly looking into platforms in the mobile VR space. GREE has already made its first investment from the fund in VRChat, a platform which lets users build their own virtual reality worlds in Unity and publish/share them like giant VR chatrooms. Notably, Colopl VR Fund and mixi are also LPs on this fund.
“The GVR Fund highlights GREE’s commitment to the potential of virtual reality as an emerging platform. We not only see ourselves as a content developer but as an investor as well. We want to create same values we successfully did in the past through investments in companies when the mobile platform took off,” said Naoki Aoyagi, Senior Vice-President at GREE, in a statement.
GREE had made some movements in the VR space internally prior to the announcement of this particular fund, including the creation of GREE VR Studio this past November and its first VR title, which it showed off at the Tokyo Game Show this past year.