holoride Investor Spotlight #2: Woodstock
We’re delighted to share another holoride supporter and continue our Investor Spotlight with key investor Woodstock.
Find out more about Woodstock and what their founding partner and Chief Investment Officer, Himanshu Yadav, had to say about holoride.
Enjoy reading!
Why did you invest in holoride?
holoride is building a novel platform that will revolutionize the media and mobility industries. It is creating an entirely new category of mass-market entertainment platform built on top of the Elrond blockchain ecosystem. The company has a unique history- it originated in the Autonomous Driving and Digital Business units at Audi, and spun out as an individual company in 2019. It has partnered with some of the biggest players in the mobility and media industry such as Audi, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Discovery Channel, Disney, and Universal Pictures. This will enable holoride to launch at scale with high-quality content. We loved our interaction with Nils and the holoride team- they are a bunch of highly skilled and experienced people who are extremely passionate about what they are building. The platform has a vast range of applications, a well-defined business model, and both B2B and B2C avenues for revenue generation. We are confident about the holoride team to deliver an exceptional product and are bullish long-term on the future of this project.
Why does the market need holoride?
holoride’s platform will add significant value to all its ecosystem participants. It will enable passengers to utilize their transit time in a meaningful way, with reduced symptoms of motion sickness. It will enable car manufacturers to offer hyper-immersive in-car entertainment to their customers and monetize vehicle data. Content creators and media companies will be empowered to develop location and motion-aware content to reach a captive audience and monetize passengers’ time. And in contrast to Web 2 platforms characterized by high monopolization, outdated compensation models, and high take rates, holoride’s ecosystem will benefit from a transparent and fair usage-based compensation model enabled by Elrond’s blockchain platform.
Why is now the right time?
holoride lies at the intersection of several emerging technologies- Blockchain, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Virtual Reality (VR), and Autonomous Cars. After years of research and development in these technologies, we believe they are on the verge of mainstream adoption. Blockchains such as Elrond now provide a scalable, low fee, and low latency platform to build apps. NFTs did more than US $3 billion in sales volume on OpenSea in August. The VR headset market is expected to grow sharply driven by growing consumer awareness and the tech becoming more accessible. holoride will grow alongside these emerging technologies to permeate the mainstream world over the next 5 to 10 years.
About Woodstock
Woodstock is a multi-asset emerging technology fund house currently focused on investments in Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) with emphasis on four areas — Infrastructure layer, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Web 3.0 protocols and Tokenization (both fungible and non-fungible). Woodstock works diligently with portfolio companies to help them scale and grow their ecosystem globally. Woodstock has made early-stage investments in pioneering DLT companies — Elrond, Covalent, Terra Virtua, Propine, and Band Protocol among others.
About holoride
The German startup holoride creates an entirely new media category for passengers by connecting XR content with data points from the vehicle in real-time. These data points include physical feedback like acceleration and steering, traffic data, as well as travel route and time.
Open to all content creators and car companies, the technology has the power to change backseat entertainment forever; holoride technology significantly reduces motion sickness, opens up a new layer of immersion in games or educational journeys, and creates a stunningly immersive experience.
The tech startup was founded end of 2018 in Munich, Germany by Nils Wollny, Marcus Kuehne, Daniel Profendiner, and Audi, which holds a minority stake in the startup. It was hailed four times “Best of CES” (Las Vegas, Jan 2019) and has been acknowledged as “Best Inventions of 2019” by TIME Magazine. In 2021, holoride went on to win the prestigious SXSW Pitch and was also named Best in Show.
