Virtual reality seeing pickup in enterprises, not by consumers

Sehgal heads the fund’s $50-million fund II and $40-million fund I that focuses on seed-stage startups building in the gaming and interactive media space.

Cognihab claims to have treated hundreds of patients and plans to expand its VR-based therapy into more clinical settings.
Cognihab claims to have treated hundreds of patients and plans to expand its VR-based therapy into more clinical settings.

While Virtual Reality (VR) has seen a slow pick-up with consumers in India, the immersive technology is seeing a significant use-case among enterprises, which are using VR headsets to offer a realistic training ground for worker safety training in critical industries such as oil and gas, according to Salone Sehgal, founding general partner at venture caiptal firm Lumikai.

“The bulky and cumbersome form factor for VR is a problem for consumer experiences. The headsets are still big and chunky and can make users nauseous after 20-30 minutes of use. However, if you look at enterprises, it’s a very important tool. VR provides a training environment, which is similar to what the worker will be in and it has got real-time haptic feedback,” she said, in an interaction with Fe.

VR also has a use case in medical training, for example, in John Hopkins University, they train medical residents in very complex spinal reconstruction surgeries via VR, she added.

Sehgal heads the fund’s $50-million fund II and $40-million fund I that focuses on seed-stage startups building in the gaming and interactive media space. She plans to bet on India’s home-grown startups building games for the local market that is home to 568 million gamers, of which 25% are paying users, according to the fund’s research report published in November last year.

“In 2020, not a lot of Indian funds particularly were looking at gaming as an investment thesis, but now, globally, there are 60+ specialist funds, which are operating in gaming and Interactive Media as a broader landscape,” she said. Recently, Lightspeed India’s Harsha Kumar also noted in an interview with Fe that India has a real opportunity to build mid-core games for the world.

Lumikai has so far invested in companies such as social entertainment platform Eloelo, Studio Sirah, Supernova, audio-first kids media platform Vobble, and AR/VR tech startup AutoVRse, among others.

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This article was first uploaded on April twenty-nine, twenty twenty-four, at thirty minutes past twelve in the am.
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