The team behind Bigscreen, the app that lets you view and share your desktop in social VR, today announced they’ve raised $11 million in Series A financing. The funding round, which comes only a year after their initial $3 million seed round, was led by True Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
The company details the news in a blogpost, say that as part of the financing round, Bigscreen Inc. will also bring on True Ventures Partner Toni Schneider as a board member.
Since the announcement of the seed round in February, which was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation by True Ventures, Presence Capital, Ludlow Ventures, David Bettner, and SV Angel, the mostly remote team says they’ve used thus far “very little of [the] $3 million seed financing,” and have several years of runway ahead of them.
According to CEO Darshan Shankar, the app’s overall usership has grown to “more than a quarter million users,” saying that thanks to several major product updates, their core metrics grew over 300% in only a few month’s time. Shankar says that Bigscreen’s power users spend 20–30+ hours every week in the app (not specified if solo viewing or social), and many users have spent more than 1,000 hours overall.
Bigscreen features both online multiuser spaces for impromptu movie watching and gameplaying for up to 4 users, and also functions as a virtual desktop, projecting your display out so you can do anything you’d normally would on you monitor.
The apps has recently gone through several major updates including a much-needed improvement to the simultaneous streaming quality, pushing output to 1080p resolution at 30 fps. The app currently supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, OSVR, and as a part of SteamVR integration, will also likely support Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
“We now need to grow the team in order to improve the product and expand the Bigscreen platform to more VR/AR devices,” Shankar says.
