After raising $4.4 million last March, Virtualitics has closed a $7 million Series B round led by Centricus with participation from The VR Fund. The startup is building a sort of “Excel for VR,” that lets people see data in a more immersive and collaborative way.
“[B]usiness intelligence platforms need to be 3D and collaborative by design in order to help companies gain a deeper level of understanding in the stories being told by the raw data,” Virtualitics CTO Ciro Donalek said in a press release.
VR data visualization does do a great job of selling insights. It’s still hard to beat VR when it comes to wrapping someone up in a visual experience and pointing their whole attention at the topic at hand. Where the tech also makes a lot of sense, is what Virtualitics is doing with their Shared Virtual Office feature, which turns VR systems into teleconferencing rooms where employees can discuss insights from data while having it life-sized in front of them. Companies also don’t need a dozen VR headsets to get going with the software, as the startup is pushing experiences on desktop and mobile as well.
As more services grow friendly to 3D visualizations of data and models, it’s a little unclear whether the jump from 2D to 3D is really giving users a ton of extra insights. While viewing a dataset imposed across a real world map inside an environment where you can look inside the data is more useful than what you’d get from some 3D Microsoft Word charts, there has seemed to be a bit overselling when it comes to how great AR/VR is for looking at stuff more immersively.
The startup’s success is going to rely a lot more on the insights it’s capable of delivering rather than the simple fact that you can check out three-dimensional charts of existing data in virtual reality. The startup says it is currently working to couple AI with its immersive environments which will definitely be key.
