Hyderabad based Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality Startup Imaginate raises $500K in Seed funding from SRI Capital
6 years ago Arpita SomaImaginate, a leading VR/AR company based in India & US, announced today that it has raised $500,000 from SRI Capital, a seed stage venture fund based in Philadelphia. Sashi Reddi, managing partner of SRI Capital, has joined the Company’s board of directors. Imaginate’s early seed investor IIIT Hyderabad has exited with this funding round.
Referring to his first investment in 2017, Sashi Reddi mentioned, “Imaginate’s collaboration platform, NuSpace, is like Webex of VR and AR. It will revolutionize the way people collaborate and learn by leveraging the best of both a physical class room like environment and the ease of a digital conferencing platform like Webex or Skype.”
Some of the popular collaboration platforms in VR include AltspaceVR and vTime that operate in the social networking space. NuSpace operates primarily in the B2B space of specialized training and education. “With just a 2 Mbps connection, every NuSpace user can communicate with one another across geographies through their realistic avatars. It is less than the minimum internet speed that a HD video connection would need.”, informs Hemanth Satyanarayana, the Managing Director of Imaginate and an alumnus of IIT Madras and University at Buffalo.
Imaginate was a part of the NASSCOM 10,000 startups warehouse program in 2016. Its director Ashok Madaravally pointed out, “NuSpace won the Most Innovative & High Potential Product award at NASSCOM’s annual product showcase held in October 2016. Not everyone is comfortable with VR. With NuSpace, one could be wearing a Mixed Reality device like HoloLens from Microsoft and others could be wearing Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, etc. This specific ability of the platform of being hardware agnostic will make it easy for the industry to start using it.”
Hemanth Satyanarayana added, “We are working on a few pilots with large corporations like Dassault Systèmes, Honeywell, etc. With the Dassault pilot, we intend to provide better support to CATIA & DELMIA model format in NuSpace and make our customers’ engineering data accessible in the platform.”
About Imaginate
Imaginate is the developer of NuSpace, a hardware agnostic, collaboration platform that enables people to communicate with one another in an immersive and interactive realistic virtual world, for purposes such as specialized industrial training, engineering design, remote maintenance and repair. Imaginate is a Gartner Top 3 Cool Vendor that operates in the space of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality. For more information on NuSpace, visit www.nuspace.live
Imaginate will use the funds to provide collaboration tools in VR, AR and MR in Industrial Training, Design and Maintenance in US and Indian markets.
