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SideQuest goes from an initial investment of $ 650,000 last year to a funding round of $ 3 million as its founders seek to create tools to help virtual reality developers.
The sideloading platform launched in 2019 two days after the release of Oculus Quest, and now SideQuest sees over a million monthly active users, according to husband and wife founders Shane Harris and Orla Harris. .
While Facebook implemented a strict console-like retention policy for Quest content on the Oculus Store, SideQuest immediately offered VR developers a way to publicly list any VR software that people can try. on Facebook’s headset. In the process, SideQuest made it very easy for adventurous Quest owners to test experimental software long before Facebook officially supported this type of distribution with its App Lab system.
The VR headset market is set to change as competitors appear to step up their efforts for more portable and powerful VR headsets and the widely supported OpenXR standard is expected to make it easier for developers to build VR apps that run. on a wide range of materials. With its pre-seed money last year, SideQuest representatives said the funding would help them build a testing service and other tools to help VR developers. SideQuest can accelerate and expand its plans now with the additional $ 3 million from leaders in the PROfounders investment cycle and the participation of Ada Ventures, Connect Ventures, Ascension, SCNE as well as several strategic angel investors.
“As the ecosystem opens up and more and more hardware enters the space, we hope to help developers port to more platforms,” Orla Harris told UploadVR.
Games like Puzzling Places, Hyper Dash, and Cubism have used SideQuest to get feedback on their developing software, effectively using the platform as a stepping stone to move to store release on various platforms. Earlier this year, SideQuest released an Android app that allowed side-loading on Quest without the need for a PC.
“This increase gives us the lead we need to focus on driving greater engagement in our communities, more support for developers and more innovation in VR. We are excited to be able to offer discovery and insight. community to the next generation of content creators, “Shane Harris told UploadVR.” We are excited to focus our energies on building tools and services to help developers target multiple platforms with OpenXR while leveraging part of the SideQuest community to broaden their audience. ”
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