Best Explosive VR Startups will be discussed in this article. Virtual reality (VR) has been an industry known largely for lofty promises and hype… but a little tangible transformation in our daily lives. That said, the VR space is still going strong. Especially for niche use cases.
From construction to content creation to medicine and beyond, a new crop of VR companies are using VR to change the way we shop, entertain ourselves, and conduct business. Read on for our list of the 19 promising VR startups that are aiming to fulfill virtual reality’s long-awaited promise.
Top 19 Explosive VR Startups In 2023
In this article, you can know about VR Startups here are the details below;
1. VRChat
- 5-year search growth: 178%
- Search growth status: Exploding
- Year founded: 2014
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Funding: $95.2M (Series D)
What they do: VRChat is a social platform for virtual reality users to interact and socialize with each other. Their platform offers users a variety of customizable avatars and environments, allowing them to create unique virtual experiences.
With VRChat, users can connect with others from around the world and immerse themselves in a variety of virtual worlds and games.
2. Sandbox VR
- 5-year search growth: 700%
- Search growth status: Exploding
- Year founded: 2016
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Funding: $63M (Series B)
What they do: Sandbox VR is a VR company that provides a location-based virtual reality experience, where players can enter immersive virtual worlds and play games with their friends. Their platform offers a variety of customizable avatars and game scenarios, allowing players to fully immerse themselves in a virtual reality experience.
With Sandbox VR, players can enjoy a social and interactive VR experience, blurring the line between physical and virtual reality.
3. Holoride
- 5-year search growth: 300%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2018
- Location: Munich, Germany
- Funding: $10.9M (Seed)
What they do: Holoride’s vision is to turn everyday car rides into virtual theme parks. By combining standard navigational data with car data plus virtual reality technology, the experience is both physical and visceral.
Car sickness isn’t a concern either. With little-to-no latency between what a user sees and feels, the experience is a seamless virtual reality journey to provide an exciting alternative to reading a book or watching a movie on a long car ride or trip.
4. Niantic
- 5-year search growth: -16%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2010
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Funding: $770M (Series D)
What they do: Niantic is best known for launching Pokemon Go, the augmented reality game that took the world by storm. Today, the company’s focus is on building products that inspire humans to go outside and interact in the real world.
The company was started by Googlers and now stands alone as an independent shop. The Niantic Real World Platform is the secret sauce, basically running as a scalable engine that can support millions of users simultaneously and provide a fluid VR/AR experience.
5. OpenSpace
- 5-year search growth: -9%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2017
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Funding: $200.4M (Series D)
What they do: OpenSpace is a VR platform for construction and real estate professionals to collaborate and track progress on building projects. Their platform enables users to capture and track 360-degree imagery of construction sites in real-time, allowing for remote collaboration, documentation, and monitoring. With OpenSpace, users can improve communication, reduce errors, and increase efficiency in the construction and real estate industries.
6. Somnium Space
- 5-year search growth: 599%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2017
- Location: London, England
- Funding: $1.3M (Seed)
What they do: Somnium Space is a decentralized social VR medium that enables users to create, explore, and monetize their virtual experiences. Their platform allows users to build and customize their virtual worlds, buy and sell virtual land, and interact with other users in real-time.
Somnium Space allows users to fully immerse themselves in a social VR experience and build a virtual presence that can generate revenue through virtual land ownership and other monetization methods.
7. Labster
- 5-year search growth: 416%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2011
- Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
- Funding: $150.5M (Series C)
What they do: Labster is a VR platform for immersive science education. Their platform offers a variety of virtual science lab simulations, allowing students to conduct experiments and learn science concepts in a safe, engaging, and interactive environment.
Labster grants students access to high-quality science education from anywhere, and educators can offer hands-on lab experience without the need for physical lab facilities.
8. Breakroom
- 5-year search growth: 20%
- Search growth status: Exploding
- Year founded: 2014
- Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
- Funding: $502K (Grant)
What they do: Breakroom aims to solve the problems of remote workplace design with their innovative VR technology. By turning compatible VR headsets into multi monitor systems, users can experience the virtual working world that more simulates the physical office.
9. The Virtual Reality Company
- 5-year search growth: 166%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2014
- Location: Los Angeles, CA
- Funding: $25.1M (Series A)
What they do: The VR Company is another startup focusing on the content side of the space.
The Jurassic World VR Experience (based on Jurassic Park) is probably their most well-known example, featuring a realistic combination of physical movement and leading VR technology.
10. Wolf3D
- 5-year search growth: 100%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2014
- Location: Kozerki, Poland
- Funding: $13M (Series A)
What they do: Wolf3D is aiming to do something a little bit different than the other startups on our list. They’re helping users create customized 3D avatars for virtual reality, games, mobile apps, all based on a photo of a real person. This is another VR Startups.
11. STRIVR
- 5-year search growth: -50%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2015
- Location: Palo Alto, CA
- Funding: $86M (Series B)
What they do: The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the move towards a digital workplace. As well as launching a new market of remote training and workplace onboarding. STRIVR is tackling the challenging issue of creating compelling hiring and training experiences at the Enterprise level.
With clients like Verizon, Walmart, and Fidelity, STRIVR has been able to build out a robust enterprise client base. In addition to the cost savings of virtual training, STRIVR has the potential to drastically reduce workplace injury and accidents by putting onboarding employees in dangerous situations…in a virtual world.
12. WEVR
- 5-year search growth: -66%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2010
- Location: Venice, CA
- Funding: $38.8M (Series B)
What they do: WEVR is aiming to be the premier VR content creation studio. Unlike other companies on our list, which focus more on VR technology, WEVR is centered around the stories being told inside of a user’s headset. With creators like Jon Favreau on board, WEVR has been able to attract a large amount of funding as they look to scale. This is another VR Startups.
13. Magic Leap
- 5-year search growth: -53%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2010
- Location: Plantation, FL
- Funding: $3.5B (Series Unknown)
What they do: Magic Leap is among the most well-known virtual reality startups in existence today. Recently winning the award for VR’s top enterprise solution, Magic Leap provides leading wearable technology with their patented Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal. This tech provides a relatively realistic virtual reality experience with life-like augmented objects. Use cases range from medicine to corporate training and beyond.
14. Virtualitics
- 5-year search growth: 99X+
- Search growth status: Exploding
- Year founded: 2015
- Location: Pasadena, CA
- Funding: $30.6M (Series B)
What they do: Virtualitics combines data visualization and data analysis with the power of virtual reality. Instead of users having to draw insights from typical Excel spreadsheets or tables, Virtualitics allows data to be manipulated in a virtual space. This is another VR Startups.
Over 11 years of research by some of the brightest minds from CalTech and NASA, along with a team of data crunchers, has turned Virtualitics into an extremely attractive VR startup for many investors.
15. Merge Labs
- 5-year search growth: 0%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2014
- Location: San Antonio, TX
- Funding: $10.1M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Merge is an educational VR company, creating lifelike digital learning experiences that teach students using a traditional school curriculum. But instead of just reading about a Monarch Butterfly, Merge allows students to hold 3D digital objects of the insect.
16. AppliedVR
- 5-year search growth: 100%
- Search growth status: Regular
- Year founded: 2015
- Location: Van Nuys, CA
- Funding: $71M (Series B)
What they do: With partnerships with esteemed medical institutions like the Cleveland Clinic, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, AppliedVR is bringing the power of virtual reality to chronic pain treatment. This is another VR Startups.
Utilizing over 30 years of academic research and with a client base of over 30,000, with over 200 hospitals, AppliedVR is one of the early leaders in the space for the treatment of acute and chronic pain through technology.
17. Obsess
- 5-year search growth: 40%
- Search growth status: Exploding
- Year founded: 2017
- Location: New York, NY
- Funding: $13.9M (Non-Equity Assistance)
What they do: Obsess is targeting retail as the next great frontier of VR. Using Obsess’s technology, retailers ranging from Coach to AT&T to Anheuser Busch are creating virtual experiences and activities for their customers. The core product is a 360 virtual experience customized to act as digital stores, showrooms (for clothing brands), or even a full retail store experience.
18. Dispelix
- 5-year search growth: 0%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2011
- Location: Espoo, Finland
- Funding: $56.9M (Series B)
What they do: Dispelix is a VR startup that develops and manufactures ultra-thin, waveguide displays for use in augmented reality (AR) devices. Their technology enables high-quality, low-power consumption displays that can be integrated into eyewear and other form factors, providing users with immersive AR experiences. Dispelix’s advanced display technology allows customers to create new AR applications and devices with improved performance and usability. This is another VR Startups.
19. Relax VR
- 5-year search growth: 0%
- Search growth status: Peaked
- Year founded: 2016
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Funding: Undisclosed (Convertible Note)
What they do: Relax VR combines meditation with an immersive virtual reality experience to help clients reach a calm and relaxed state. Instead of staffing a full spa, Relax aims to let their headset do much of the rejuvenation work that a human would normally be required for. Tranquil landscapes or guided meditations allow the user to have a complete experience of relaxation and engage all of their senses simultaneously.
Conclusion
Virtual Reality has the potential to transform dozens of industries, and even the way we live our daily lives. From medicine to real estate to entertainment, virtual reality is just getting started. Even though it may never become a mainstream tech, the companies here prove that the industry has the potential to thrive in many industries and niche use cases. And the VR startups on this list represent some of the best attempts to create value in the space.
