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SideQuest Acquires Massive Seed Fund as the Founders Aim to Design Technology to Help VR Developers.
Founded in 2019, the popular sideloading company managed to secure a $3 million seed fund. An amazing achievement, considering it only managed to raise $650,000 in 2020. The platform made its debut shortly after the launch of Oculus Quest (May 2019) and as of today, SideQuest has racked up more than one million active monthly users, according to Shane and Orla Harris. The husband and wife team are also the founders of the platform.
The company offers a streamlined platform to developers where they can upload content before its initial public release. This essentially means, VR developers and content creators have a powerful advantage to validate their content and designs. And also focus on forging interactive communities before bringing their content to market.
The $3 million seed fund was spearheaded by venture capital company ProFounders (London-based) with additional participants such as SCNE, Ascension, Connect Ventures, and Ada Ventures. This was SideQuest’s biggest capital raise since the company’s inception. These news come only a year after the company managed to round up $650k. This was funded by Palmer Lucky (founder of Oculus VR) and VC firm Boost. As posted by the Irish Times, this current seed fund has propelled SideQuest’s present valuation to $10 M.
According to Shane Harris, the current raise has helped the company lay the foundations for boosting more engagement in the online VR communities. It’s going to help them leverage exponential support for VR developers as well as upcoming content creators.
The SideQuest founders now have the runway needed to focus on delivering cutting-edge technologies and support tools. To help VR companies and independent developers leverage a variety of platforms that can integrate OpenXR while at the same time, growing SideQuest’s monthly users and overall audiences.
It’s easy to see that the VR industry is strategically positioned for exponential change as market rivals are engaged in levelling up more convenient, powerful, and portable VR headsets integrated with OpenXR tech. VR analysts speculate that OpenXR is going to be a crucial component in driving flexibility and ease for developers to design broad-spectrum VR apps that function on various types of hardware.
The VC firm, ProFounders, says that it’s confident that SideQuest can become a driving force for propelling change and growth for the VR industry.
The $3 million funding to SideQuest will essentially be used to further enhance the platform, according to Orla Harris. The co-founder is excited to see what the next stage of growth will bring. The SideQuest team is eager and relentless to increase engagement in the VR developer community. It has always been their mission to provide developers with the tools they need to shape their visions.
