The company behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset raised $75 million in its second round of funding, which will help the company finalize its platform before it's released to consumers.
Andreessen Horowitz leads the Series B round. As part of the round of funding, Netscape founder and Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Marc Andreessen will join the Oculus VR board of directors. The round also consisted of funding from Series A investors Spark Capital, Matrix Partners and Formation 8.
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The Oculus Rift allows users to play immersive video games in stereoscopic 3D. The virtual reality headset makers first raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter last August in a campaign that reached 10 times its funding goal, then another $16 million in Series A funding.
Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe said the money will help the company expand its platform to be ready for consumer demand once the Oculus Rift launches, though he declined to give a hard date. Iribe said the funding was necessary after Oculus VR executives realized how much they had improved upon their original plans for a virtual reality platform.
"We had our vision for where virtual reality would go one day, and 16 months after starting, we've exceeded our own expectations," Iribe said. "We've really cracked the nut on virtual reality, and we're really going to be making noise in the next couple of months."
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Although 40,000 developer Oculus Rift units have been sent out, Oculus VR has publicly iterated on that original design at least once. The original headset displayed images across the eye pieces at 720p, but Oculus VR has shown a prototype to press that displays at 1080p. While Iribe declined to elaborate on the company's roadmap, they will be showing something at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The funding will allow Oculus VR to deliver on the promise of an "all in one virtual reality experience, that you can buy, turn on, and play games and watch movies," Iribe said.
Andreessen's involvement on the board is actually almost a homecoming. The founder of Netscape-turned-Angel-investor actually worked on a virtual reality project when he was a student at the University of Illinois-Champaign, Iribe said.
Iribe said Andreessen and other investors were also helping them shape the bigger picture of what virtual reality can do as a communication platform.
"This is not just about video games. It will change, revolutionize and disrupt a lot of different industries, especially the way we do communications," Iribe said. "While this won't all be ready in v1, we expect this could affect tens of millions of people in the next decade or so."
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