Professional-grade VR headset maker Varjo has raised a further $54 million in funding, and it attributes a good amount of its success to its new XR-1 headset.
Announced today, Varjo’s Series C round of funding was supported by the likes of Tesi, NordicNinja, and Swisscanto Invest. Plus, the company has a new CEO – former COO Timo Toikkanen is taking over from Niko Eiden, who will continue on as CXO and a board member.
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This latest round of funding pushes the Finnish company past $100 million raised to date. In the press release, Varjo says it will use the funds to “accelerate its global expansion and development of industry-leading hardware and software products.”
It’s been an eventful year for Varjo, which has been keen to push out new hardware and features against growing demand for enterprise VR offerings. In December, for example, the company launched the XR-1, a $10,000 device that built on its ultra-high-resolution VR-2 headset with passthrough AR support. Speaking to UploadVR, Toikkanen noted that demand for the device had been stronger than anticipated.
“XR-1 has generated interest way beyond what we originally thought – the world’s first photorealistic mixed reality device has started a new era for our customers for example in advanced pilot training and automotive design, where virtual and real environments start to blend seamlessly together,” he said. “At the same time we have been fortunate to have customers like Boeing to take our VR technology to unseen heights with their Starliner astronaut training program, so there’s a lot of innovation and exciting customer developments happening in that space too.”
Varjo has also been announcing key partnerships, like a recent collaboration with MeetinVR for a specific version of its VR collaboration app that supports its headsets. Toikkanen says to expect more of these partnerships going forward.
But what about new hardware? When asked about the possibility of a VR-3 or XR-2, the CEO told us “our teams are working super hard to implement new features for both our virtual and mixed reality products that are driven by our customer needs. Some of these worth mentioning are the support for visual markers, the ability to manipulate the video pass-through feed in real time with different visual effects and real-time chroma keying support in mixed reality.”
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