Jaunt VR, a company dedicated to creating a platform for the production of cinematic virtual reality content, today announced that it has closed a series B funding round, raising $27.8 million, led by Highland Capital Partners with participation by Google Ventures.
The series B round comes just 5 months after the company raised $6.8 million in its series A. The company says they’ve got “the first full-stack hardware and software solution for cinematic VR.” The company’s most visible creation is the Jaunt camera, a 360 degree audio/video rig which captures video that is processed into 3D footage and can be viewed all around using a VR headset. Recently the company revealed that it was shooting The Mission VR, a WWII short film for virtual reality, with director Matthew Gratzner and New Deal Studios.
See Also: On the Set of ‘The Mission VR,’ A WWII Short Film Shot for Virtual Reality
The company’s series B investment round is led by Highland Capital Partners who have invested in companies such as Leap Motion and LevelUp. Google Ventures joined in, and investors from the company’s series A, Redpoint Ventures, British Sky Broadcasting (Sky), Peter Gotcher, and Blake Krikorian, also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total funding to over $34 million.
The company says that the funds will help it continue to grow.
“This round of funding will enable us to scale up in several ways. First and foremost, it will allow us to continue to grow the world-class team we’ve already begun to put together. We’ll be able to build additional cameras and build out the production team, which means we can film and produce more content, and do it on a larger scale. We’ll also continue to establish new and exciting partnerships with the creative community and other platform providers.”
Jaunt has been walking a fine line between producing tools for VR content creation and creating VR content themselves. Regarding whether or not the Jaunt camera will be sold to the public, the company says, “Jaunt’s current focus is on helping the top content creators produce the highest quality cinematic VR content and we do not have a timeline established for when our camera units will be available for commercial sale. ”
The company says that the content they create will be “device agnostic”, playable on any VR headset, like the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus, through a custom application designed to deploy the content.
