The resolution of Virtual Reality devices on the market is just 1/100 of what the average human eye can see. This means that all visual details are lost due to heavy pixelization, which makes these products rather useless in professional applications. Varjo is the first and only company in the world to deliver human-eye resolution virtual and mixed reality devices, meeting the most demanding enterprise applications across training and simulation, design and engineering and research. With the latest funding round, the Finnish startup has raised $100 million in total.
Summer is supposed to be the relaxing and less stressful period of the year. Not for Varjo. At the beginning of August, the EIC-funded company has closed $54 million (€46 million) in funding. Tesi, NordicNinja, and Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank are among the new investors contributing to the round, in addition to follow-on investment participation from existing investors including Lifeline Ventures, Atomico, EQT Ventures and Volvo Cars Tech Fund. The new capital will allow Varjo to accelerate its global expansion and development of industry-leading hardware and software products.
“We see tremendous demand for virtual and mixed reality use cases, particularly as much of the world continues to work remotely,” said Timo Toikkanen, CEO of Varjo. “With support from our growing group of investors, we look forward to scaling our operations and delivering the cutting-edge technology our customers need to transform the way they work.”
Global enterprises including Volvo Cars, Boeing, Audi and Siemens use the company’s XR-1 Developer Edition, VR-2 and VR-2 Pro devices to conduct immersive astronaut and pilot training, design the cars of the future, streamline product development, and more. Petteri Koponen, the founding partner at Lifeline Ventures and the Varjo’s chairman of the board, highlighted the success of this startup in a statement:
“We were early seed investors in Varjo and we believed in their vision for how immersive computing could transform the way professionals work from the very beginning. In less than four years, Varjo has delivered both industry-leading hardware and software to the market,” said Koponen. “We are thrilled to be participating in this latest funding round as the company continues to scale and deliver an ecosystem capable of bringing enterprise XR adoption mainstream.”
This round of funding follows a year full of achievements, such as the expansion of the company’s global operations and reseller network to over 40 countries in North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Varjo has also signed a commercial partnership with MeetinVR to deliver photorealistic virtual collaboration, a much-needed solution for users to be able to collaborate remotely.
The company received a Phase 2 EIC Grant of €2.3M to support the development of its product in order to make it market-ready.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.