VRChat Partners with Anthos Capital to Close $80M Series D
The VRChat team is excited to announce that we have closed an $80M Series D investment round. This latest financing was led by Anthos Capital, alongside existing investors Makers Fund, GFR fund and others. We welcome Anthos and are proud to have them on board!
This new investment will allow us to expand the VRChat team, iterate on the platform and grow our community. This includes the ability for creators to earn and enable more people around the world to access VRChat. Partners like Anthos Capital open unique opportunities to help us further our goal as a virtual universe.
“VRChat hosts a vibrant, creative, and engaged community that has played a critical role in shaping its continued development. We’re excited to work with our investment partners to further grow and empower our community at an accelerated pace.”
- Graham Gaylor, Founder/CEO of VRChat.
“We are proud to partner with VRChat as it further revolutionizes social experiences. As the market for virtual reality grows, VRChat is primed for significant expansion and growth as the leading platform for virtual worlds.”
- Brian Ames, Managing Director at Anthos Capital.
“VRChat’s passionate and talented team has been building the most immersive creator-led and community-first platform. At Makers we look for innovative companies with great leaders; we are true believers in VRChat’s mission to deliver a user generated VR experience, connecting people around the world and are very excited to continue on the journey with them.”
- Jay Chi, Founding Partner at Makers Fund.
What is VRChat?
VRChat is an ever-expanding virtual universe powered by a passionate community.
Using Unity, our SDK, and our Udon programming language, creators can build avatars or worlds and upload them to share with others. This open-ended creativity and the dynamics of sharing in an active social environment power VRChat. It has led to a never-ending fountain of entertaining, surprising and wonderful experiences.
From the earliest days of VRChat we knew that people have more creative ideas than we could ever imagine for ourselves. We provided them with the most powerful tools to express those ideas and they have shown us what they can do. With more than ten million unique uploads our creative world and avatar builders continue to surpass our wildest expectations.
- Jesse Joudrey, CTO
VRChat supports the Oculus Quest, all leading PC VR headsets, and many VR accessories. However, a VR headset is not required to participate. All that’s needed is a Windows PC that meets the minimum requirements for our platform. VRChat offers cross-platform VR support via Steam, Oculus PC, Oculus Quest, and VIVEPORT, with additional platforms on the way.
Our Continually-Growing Community
“VRChat has become a well-known, pop-culture phenomenon. The VRChat team has always been rich in ideas but short on resources. This round of funding will accelerate our ambitions to grow VRChat alongside our community in many meaningful ways for years to come.”
- Ron Millar, Chief Creative Officer
VRChat enables everyone to connect with friends and make new ones from around the globe. They hang out, play interactive Udon-powered games, find new friends, visit inspiring worlds, and share their experiences with others. People often find lasting friendships and communities stemming from their time in VRChat. That time is often hours per session, multiple times per week — many people have logged thousands or even tens of thousands of hours!
VRChat communities have grown in and outside the application to all corners of the internet, including streaming, communication, and fund-raising platforms. These interconnected communities support our users, from popular performers to creators and groups. Some of the most popular places for our community to hang out, create, and collaborate are one of thousands of Discord servers, Twitch streams, YouTube channels, and endless Twitter conversations.
During the ongoing pandemic, VRChat has also served as a way for our community to meet up and hang out with their friends in settings that they might want to avoid in real-life. A crowded room packed with people dancing to live DJ music might not be advisable in many parts of the world right now — but in VRChat, it is a regular (and safe!) occurrence. Even as some parts of the world begin to recover and open back up, our community continues to grow with the newfound connections they made along the way.
Our community has shown their support by buying our optional subscription, VRChat Plus, which unlocks some enhancements and perks. VRC+ has been greatly successful, and has been instrumental in helping us expand via features like Regions. We plan on expanding VRC+ by enabling purchases on the Oculus platform, as well as allowing players to gift subscriptions to each other. We are so grateful to our community for their support!
This investment will expedite our efforts in building systems to give our community the ability to organize and earn. Our upcoming Groups system will help people self-organize based on their interests or hobbies, and the Creator Economy will enable anyone to earn from their own creations. These systems alongside other improvements will help foster community growth into the future.
Creation Tools
VRChat creators have the unique opportunity to create shared virtual content with industry-standard tools like Unity, Blender, Maya, or any other 3D authoring software. After creating their world or avatar, they use the VRChat SDK to upload it into VRChat and share their creations with the world. Many VRChat users have learned how to use these tools from scratch in order to make their ideas reality.
VRChat is built using the popular Unity game engine — a powerful, widely-adopted industry standard. If you are already a Unity developer, then it’s easy to create VRChat content.
Often, new creators will learn Unity to create for VRChat and then apply those skills to build their own games and software using Unity. The VRChat creator community is full of success stories where creators got their start making an avatar or world for VRChat.
Events
VRChat works with many partners and communities to build amazing events that are extremely immersive and highly social, including virtual conferences, marketplaces, concerts and more. We’re always on the look out for strong event partners and communities to host events with.
However, not all events in VRChat require our involvement! Our innovative community creates and runs endless events of all kinds and at all scales. Music festivals like MUZZfest bring in world-acclaimed DJs and artists to show to thousands of attendees. Regular events like GHOSTCLUB, SHELTER, Loner Online, and dozens upon dozens of others set and raise the bar repeatedly for immersive virtual reality experiences.
Every Sunday, the Community Meetup and VRChat Prefabs walks through worlds and projects in VRChat that members are working on, giving feedback, testing, and collaboratively building.
There’s also a wide variety of enthusiast conventions that occur in VRChat. Some are directly VRChat related like avatar builder conventions, while others showcase work from the panelists like music, games, comics, or other art. Of course, some of our community’s conventions are just for hanging out with people with common interests!
As we grow, we will continue to work with event partners that mesh well with the VRChat community, and encourage anyone interested to run events for anything they’re passionate about. The upcoming Groups system will also help with setting up and attending events.
Avatars
One of the most important aspects of VRChat is your custom avatar. You can create one yourself, or you can find one that fits you best. By finding an avatar pedestal, you can interact with it to become a robot, zombie, alien, anime character, or anything you can think of!
If you can’t find something that fits your persona, you can create an avatar yourself. Either make one from scratch using software like Blender, use an avatar creator from one of our partners like Tafi or Wolf3D, or purchase one directly from a creator.
Our state-of-the-art avatar systems enable expression in meaningful and emotional ways that our community loves. We empower artists, performers, musicians, dancers, puppeteers, comedians, coders, shader wizards, actors, filmmakers and more to create and share their art with the world.
Our Avatar 3.0 system offers unmatched customization, expression, and customizability to make your avatar work exactly how you want it to. Both newbie and experienced avatar creators can craft amazing avatars for themselves and their friends.
This investment will expedite our efforts to expand our avatar system, allowing avatars to interact with each other in new and exciting ways, like “boop”-ing your friend on the nose and having hearts pop out, or bonking them on the head for a classic spinning stars effect. This will breathe new life into having fun creating and using avatars.
Growing our Connected Communities
The VRChat team maintains close connections across our global community using various tools like our Discord, our Feedback boards, our forums, VRChat itself, and more. Our platform is heavily driven by community input, and keeping these connections open allows us to adapt and learn as VRChat continues to grow.
We recently introduced Regions, which is a way for players in different parts of the world to play VRChat with improved ping and latency. As part of our continued growth plan, we will be working towards localization for our international communities.
“We are building a new social system called ‘Groups’ that will let our community self-organize around anything they want. This will enable wider growth across VRChat as people find or create a Group to connect with others that share interests and activities.”
- Charles Tupper, Community Manager
VRChat is a fertile environment for top content creators on Twitch and YouTube. VRChat has over two and a half million followers on Twitch, where community streamers stream adventures, roleplay, content creation, talk shows, nightclub DJs, and more.
We maintain one of the largest Discord communities, with nearly 200,000 users. In addition, there are thousands of VRChat communities that use Discord to collaborate and plan their adventures.
Always Something New
You only have to open the VRChat “Worlds” menu to find thousands of places to discover and explore, filled with people to explore them with. Every day, there are hundreds of brand new worlds uploaded to VRChat, ready to be discovered.
This deluge of new content can be overwhelming. Our new investment allows us to accelerate efforts to improve the experience for both creators and explorers. We are working on a reimagined UI and supporting systems to facilitate better search and discovery of content. This will make it easier for users to find the things they enjoy, as well as step into brand-new experiences they’ve never had. These improvements are part of the path towards the creator-driven economy and continued growth.
Using the VRChat SDK, our community has created a vast array of interactive worlds: social games, secluded hangout spots, quiet bars, busy nightclubs, scary escape rooms, complex puzzles and mysteries, drawing and painting rooms, performance stages, racing tracks, jetpack testing grounds, mind-blowing audio-visual experiences, photorealistic locations, mountainsides to climb, treehouses standing in the middle of a vast field of fractal environments — and a lot more that defy explanation. No matter what you’re looking for, there’s a world for you. Like what you see? You can save that world as a favorite or make it your home.
VRChat also contains hundreds and hundreds of avatar worlds. Here, you can find thousands of avatars to browse through and try on, often following themes reflecting popular culture. Put on a new look and check out your fresh identity in a mirror.
The Power of Udon
VRChat Udon is our programming language designed specifically for VRChat. It utilizes a “node graph” graphical interface to permit both new and experienced users to create complex, interactive content for their VRChat worlds.
Udon has unlocked a whole new class of creativity in VRChat by allowing content creators to build complex interaction and behaviors into their worlds. All of our most popular worlds use Udon to drive experiences, social games, and more — and our community seems to create something new and amazing with Udon every single day.
In addition to building with Udon as it comes out-of-the-box, the VRChat community has built amazing tools such as UdonSharp which lets creators use our tools in ways that feel more comfortable or powerful to them. We continually work with our community to augment and power-up Udon so that they can build the next big world.
Udon will soon be able to take advantage of World and Player Persistence. This will empower our community to create meaningful experiences that they can pause and continue later, or invent creative systems to take advantage of the saved information.
Virtual Workspace
From day one, the VRChat team has worked as a fully remote team with teammates all over the world. We use VRChat daily for team stand-ups, design jams, testing ideas, prototypes and builds. Occasionally this leads to interesting situations like participating in a design discussion led by an alien, an art presentation held by an octopus, or a production stand-up summarized by a space marine.
Remote work makes it easier for us to hire the best people for our team. There’s no need to relocate or commute to an office every day. As part of our interview process our team meets with candidates in VR. We’ve discovered interviewing “in person” with an avatar of their choosing can be relaxed, creative, and fun. Many times the candidates we consider are already involved in the VRChat community.
Our team also spends many hours in VRChat for work and fun. If you’re at community meetups, game events, music clubs, or just hanging out in a virtual world chatting, it is not uncommon to run into a VRChat developer. Because we’re part of the community, we share the same passions for VRChat as they do. We use this connection to help us drive the direction of development.
We use our Discord and other reporting channels like our Feedback boards to work closely with our community to perform beta testing, gather feedback, build bug reports, and collect feature requests. This communication is an important part of the continuing improvement of VRChat.
VRChat also uses Twitch streaming more directly to deliver official “Developer Streams” where we talk about what we’re working on, hold interviews, and answer questions in real-time. In addition, we make posts on our blog delving into the depths of technical systems, upcoming changes, and new features or systems.
We’re Hiring!
With resources secured and plans in place, the VRChat team is hiring and ready to grow. We’re seeking talented and passionate people to help with the development and growth of the platform. More information on those roles can be found here on our Careers page, which will be expanded with more positions in the coming weeks.
Find out more
This large investment is pretty big news! As we talked about above, we plan on using this investment from our new partners to help expedite the goals of the VRChat team and the community. We realize how special and important VRChat is to everyone, because it is special and important to us, too! Our team cares deeply about the spirit of VRChat, and above all else, we will always work to keep that intact.
If you’d like to contact us, feel free to email us at hello@vrchat.com. You can also visit the official VRChat website at www.vrchat.com. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @VRChat!
As mentioned, we’ve got an active Discord community where you can join and chat about VRChat. Click here to join!
We’ve got a whole up-to-date section on our site for our Press Kit. Click here to access it!
Thank you for reading, and we’ll see you next time.
— The VRChat Team & Investors
