Hyderabad based AR/VR startup Imaginate raises $500K from SRI Capital

Hyderabad based augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) startup, Imaginate Technologies, has has raised $500,000 (INR 33.5 crore approx) in seed investment round from Philadelphia, US, based seed stage venture fund, SRI Capital. Imaginate will use the funds to provide collaboration tools for AR & VR and scale up its operations in the US and run pilots with large-scale organizations. As part of the transaction, SRI Capital founder and managing partner Sashi Reddi will join Imaginate’s board. International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, which invested in the Indian subsidiary of Imaginate Software Labs four years ago, exited in the funding round. Imaginate developed NuSpace, a hardware agnostic, collaboration platform that enables people to communicate with one another in an immersive and interactive realistic virtual world. NuSpace operates primarily in the B2B space and can be used in industrial training and collaborative design, from a manufacturing point of view. Its technology can be used to provide customised VR and AR solutions to those in the retail, healthcare, defence, education and entertainment segments, among others. Commenting on the development, Sashi Reddi, MD, SRI Capital said, “NuSpace is like the Webex of VR and AR. It will change the way people collaborate and learn by leveraging the best of both physical classroom-like environment and the ease of a digital conferencing platform like Webex or Skype.” Imaginate was founded by Hemanth Satyanarayana in 2011. “With just 2 Mbps connection, every NuSpace user can communicate with one another across geographies through realistic avatars.It is less than the minimum internet speed that an HD video connection would need,” Satyanarayana said.