Only 5% AR/VR Startups in India Raised Any Funding in Last 5 Years

In past few years there has been an quite a good emergence of 170 Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) startups in India, 60% of which launched in the past 24 months. Bengaluru takes the lead, attracting 27% of these startups, followed by Delhi at 25% and Mumbai at 13%, according to a Market Pulse Report on AR and VR, by GrowthEnabler, a data and intelligence firm on disruptive technology/digital startups.

Various industry estimates peg the global AR/VR market at $100-120 billion by 2021.

According to a Market Pulse Report on AR and VR, by GrowthEnabler, a data and intelligence firm on disruptive technology/digital startups, in the world across the AR segment has received $2.5 billion in funding, and VR $2.7 billion.

“In India, of the 100 AR startups, only 5% have received any form of capital investment of $1-1.5 million. Of the 70 VR start-ups, only a handful have raised any seed/angel capital. Even the top 15 AR/VR start-ups that GrowthEnabler has identified based on over 50 parameters, have collectively raised under $3 million in funding. But all that is going to change in the next five years,” Banda said.

The Karnataka governmnet is actively promoting AR/VR start-ups by providing incubation, mentoring, idea validation by experts, opportunities to deploy pilots with various departments, along with fund support for eligible ones. “We have around 50 start-ups in the AR/VR space in our physical and virtual incubation programmes” said Priyank Kharge, Karnataka IT Minister.

Despite of all this however there's a good news for all AR/VR startups in India that Indian AR/VR market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 76% over the next five years, fuelled by demand from business and consumer sectors.

The above report was first published in Business Line.

A couple of months back only, Bengaluru based AR-enabled interactive educational games startup Play Shifu has raised funding of undisclosed amounf in a pre-Series A round led by IDG Ventures and IDFC-Parampara Fund and, in the same month, followed by $500,000 funding of Kalpnik Technologies, which is a virtual reality-driven spiritual startup.

Prior to this, famous West Indies cricketer Chris Gayle had too invested in a Bangalore based AR startup FlippAR.

In October 2017, another VR & AR startup GridRaster has a raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of venture capital firms.

In May 2017, Chymera VR Inc, a virtual reality advertising platform, had secured funding from a clutch of angel investors, including People Group founder and chief executive Anupam Mittal, Airbnb’s global expansion head Varsha Rao, Google executive Surojit Chatterjee, and HHC Holdings chairman Nirav Choksi.