The total AR/VR financing scale in 2019 has decreased compared with last year. According to incomplete statistics from Qingting.com, the total global AR/VR financing scale in 2019 reached approximately US$2.34 billion, a decrease of approximately 36% from last year.
Among them, AR accounted for 1.03 billion US dollars and VR accounted for 1.31 billion US dollars (of which 130 million US dollars came from companies involved in both AR/VR business).
In comparison, the financing scale of AR and VR last year was US$1.428 billion and US$2.21 billion respectively (Qingting.com data).
(Note: This statistics does not include financing and acquisitions with undisclosed amounts, or crowdfunding. Those officially announced as "tens of millions" of yuan are calculated as "10 million". In addition, AR/VR benefits but is not directly related
Corporate financing and acquisitions are not included (such as computer vision, gesture recognition, holography, virtual idols, etc.). At the same time, AR and VR are listed separately, so the data and other statistics will be different, please be informed.) Summary.
The reason for the decline in financing scale is that on the one hand, the capital market has become calmer, and on the other hand, some industry trends can also be found, such as: AR has gradually moved from the product innovation stage to the implementation of application scenarios, and after the VR headset market has experienced survival of the fittest, only Oculus and HTC are left.
Waiting for leading companies and a few companies, more financing in the AR/VR field has flowed into application development and solution companies, confirming the trend of AR/VR starting to pay more attention to applications.
In addition, the financing performance in 2019 can also be seen from the investment of giant companies in different fields of AR. For example, Huawei's subsidiary companies invested in AR optical waveguide manufacturer Kunyou Optoelectronics, or are accumulating efforts for the research and development of AR glasses; Alibaba chose to invest in a mobile AR marketing company
Wanmei Mobile; Google invested US$500,000 in Hello Team Solar to develop LBS AR applications.
The AR capital market is calm. If you want to understand the performance of the AR capital market in 2019, you can see from the financing path of the "star company" Magic Leap that AR has left the "concept video" stage and begun to pay more attention to practical applications and core technologies such as optics.
R&D.
AR Financing In 2018 and before, Magic Leap’s financing in a single year was no less than US$460 million. After receiving US$280 million in financing from Japanese operator NTT Docomo in April 2019, it did not disclose new financing.
It is reported that the E-round financing is already in progress, but there is no update news yet.
It was revealed that Magic Leap One had a large backlog of inventory. In order to obtain more funds, Magic Leap once mortgaged all its patents to JPMorgan Chase. Many of its executives even resigned, and the company suffered major changes.
In addition to Magic Leap, the AR glasses manufacturers that received more financing in 2019 are: Liangfengtai (US$53.81 million), North (US$40 million), QD Laser (US$33.69 million), and Nreal (US$31 million).
In addition, 7 AR optical companies received financing in the first half of 2019, with a total scale of US$80 million (the scale of Kunyou Optoelectronics’ financing is unknown), most of which focus on optical waveguide optical modules.
The total number of financings for industry applications is 23 times, with a total scale of US$170 million. Among them, RealWear, an industrial AR helmet solution provider, received three financings this year, totaling approximately US$100 million.
Other AR industry application companies that have received financing are involved in medical, industrial, training, marketing, education and other scenarios.
In 2019, only two AR entertainment companies including Niantic received financing, which shows that the development of AR entertainment is still slow. Even Niantic launched another LBS AR game "Harry Potter" after "Pokemon Go"
"Special: Wizards Unite" has not yet shown the same trend of sweeping the world.
Pay more attention to VR content development. The VR headset market is still developing slowly in 2019. In addition to the internal R&D investment of Facebook, HTC, Valve, Huawei and other giants, a few VR headset manufacturers have received financing, including: iQiyi Smart (100 million yuan)
, Parallel Reality Pareal (tens of millions of RMB), Dapeng VR (tens of millions of RMB).
VR Financing Fewer capital flows into VR headset companies, coupled with the difficulty of other companies making breakthroughs in VR headset technology innovation, indicate that the entire VR market is progressing slowly.
Domestic Huawei, 3Glasses, and Pico have seized on the trend of short-focus VR headsets, and Varjo continues to develop dual-screen display solutions. These are all worthy of attention.