$3 million financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz
We are pleased to announce that Bigscreen has accepted a $3 million venture capital investment led by Andreessen Horowitz. As part of this investment, we will be working closely with Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andresseen Horowitz. We’re also excited to work with other participants in the round including True Ventures, Presence Capital, Ludlow Ventures, David Bettner, and SV Angel. Interestingly, we did our investment pitches in virtual reality, using Bigscreen to close the round!
These are early days in VR and AR, and we’re here for the long run. This funding will allow us to accelerate our development plan and pursue our long-term vision. We’re taking a disciplined and lean approach by building a small core team.
This is our story.
Bigscreen was created in 2014 and released in 2016. Since the beginning, we wanted to focus on building useful tools that enable productivity, entertainment, and collaboration. Bigscreen is approaching a specific question: how will VR and AR headsets change the way we use our computers?
We aren’t building a content company or a gaming company. We aren’t building the “metaverse” and our goal is not to build a social network. Instead, we aim to build a platform that enables people to use existing content, apps, and games in VR, and to socialize and hangout in a shared virtual space with their friends and coworkers.
Breaking out of the screen
It’s obvious that VR and AR will transform industries like architecture and VFX with new 3D modeling and design tools. Creating, interacting, and viewing 3D content in 3D space is clearly powerful; amazing tools like Google Tilt Brush and Oculus Medium are a glimpse at that future. It’s less obvious why 2D content will be compelling in VR and AR. Here’s why:
2D content isn’t going anywhere. Microsoft Word won’t be text flying around you in 3D space. Flat content like movies and videogames won’t suddenly disappear or get replaced by 360 videos and VR games.
But most importantly, VR and Bigscreen enables interaction with computers the way humans think: spatially. This lets us organize apps and information in 3D space. The desktop screen you see in Bigscreen today is “legacy” support for the computing world before VR. Next, we are building native VR apps inside Bigscreen.
Bigscreen can improve the way software engineers work by bringing existing programming tools into VR. Documentation to the left, Stackoverflow on the right, and a code editor in front. Stuck on a problem? A colleague — potentially located thousands of miles away — can instantly teleport in. Bigscreen is also a powerful telecollaboration and telepresence tool that an engineering team can use to sit virtually next to each other for problem solving and pair programming.
Collaboration like the real world
Remote work has traditionally been significantly less productive compared to sitting next to our colleagues in a physical space. Current limitations include the inability to use body language, point at things, and to collaborate on shared information.
Bigscreen uses VR to get around these limitations by making remote collaboration feel more like sitting side-by-side with your team in a shared virtual space.
Meeting tools in the real world struggle to bridge the digital and analog world with video conferencing and digital whiteboards.
With Bigscreen, we can create augmented meeting environments that are far more productive and useful than current meeting tools. Bigscreen can enable people around the world to collaborate on ideas in front of a shared whiteboard. Meetings can be archived and transcribed. We’re already seeing companies host virtual meetings in Bigscreen.
Our Progress
We launched the Bigscreen Beta on Steam in March 2016 alongside the consumer launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Since then, Bigscreen has grown to become one of the most popular and highest rated VR apps with 150,000 users and 800 reviews on the Oculus Store (beating award-winning VR games like Superhot and Elite Dangerous). Power users spend 20–30 hours each week in Bigscreen, making it one of the most widely used “killer apps” in the industry.
Watching movies in the virtual home theater is one of the most popular use cases of Bigscreen. 3D movies look especially stunning in VR by providing a sense of depth to otherwise flat movies. We have noticed a wide range of use cases from web browsing, business meetings, casual social hangouts, music & video editing, as well as virtual LAN parties and playing PC games in VR.
What’s Next
We’ve got an intense roadmap planned for 2017, including launching a 1.0 by summer, native Bigscreen apps, and expanding the Bigscreen platform to mobile VR headsets.
We’re also hiring! We’re looking for experienced 3D artists, software engineers, and designers to join the team. We’re a fully remote company, dogfooding Bigscreen as a virtual office. If working on the future of personal computing interests you, please reach out.
These are the early days and personal computing is about to change forever. Many will dismiss this as a silly toy, but eventually people will wonder how we ever used tiny 2D screens.
Read more about our funding in The Wall Street Journal.
