Several venture capital firms and VR companies including HTC Vive have formed the Virtual Reality (VR) Venture Capital Alliance. The venture organization has $10 billion in funding to invest in augmented and virtual reality projects.
The announcement has been made today by HTC Vive, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Shanghai. The VR Venture Capital Alliance presents its mission statement on its official website. According to the venture organization, the huge amount of money in funding will be invested in a single sector comprising AR and VR technologies.
With a wide variety of VCs included in the group, the Alliance is planning to create a wide net across industry verticals in the mixed, AR and VR fields. The 28 VC firms and VR/AR companies forecast a great potential of VR and AR industry. According to market researcher Digi-Capital, this industry will become a $30 billion market by the year 2020.
According to VentureBeat, the Alliance is currently accepting new project submissions on a special page on their website. The venture organization will meet six times a year in San Francisco and Beijing.
The meetings that will take place every two months have the purpose to allow companies presenting their new projects with hope to raise some funds to power their ideas. VR and AR technologies will requiring a large capital as they look to make the crossover to mass market adoption from R&D phases.
The Alliance plans to invest in a wide range of technologies, such as mixed reality, AR and VR. Besides HTC, the maker of the HTC Vive VR headset, the Alliance includes many well-known VC's such as Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures and 500 Startups.
According to TechCrunch, HTC's regional head in China, Alvin Graylin, will head up the Alliance. He said in a statement that, rather than competing, for the first time renowned VCs are joining hands "to drive the future of a new industry."
