The virtual fire continues to heat up beneath the AR/VR industry with investments continuing to build and soar. According to a report from Digi-Capital, AR and VR investments are taking off pretty rapidly with nearly $700 million being invested into the space in 2015.
The overall trends show investment steadily rising. The report notes that there “have now been 6 straight quarters of AR/VR investment growth, with a quarter of a billion dollars invested in Q4 2015 alone at nearly 6x the rate of mid-2014.”
The report also detailed that 2015 saw just $311 million of AR/VR M&A exits, which it noted wasn’t all that surprising given how relatively early it is in the industry’s life cycle. The report stressed that there would likely be significant movement soon in the industry as “major players try to leapfrog the competition”
Another item that’s clear from the report is the fact that secretive powerhouse Magic Leap is an impressively hulking force in the industry. Their $542M Series B led by Google in October of 2014 presents a pretty clear kink in the generally nice upward trend of yearly investments.
The report also obviously doesn’t include Magic Leap’s (still unconfirmed) 2015 raise, which Forbes reported clocked in at a staggering and industry-dwarfing $827 million.
The report has a pretty bullish outlook on the future growth of VR/AR, suggesting that the “next platform shift to AR/VR looks like it could drive growth to $120 billion by 2020.” That is a hell of a lot of dough.
