GridRaster gets seed funds from Exfinity, other VCs

Bengaluru: GridRaster Inc. has raised $2 million in seed funding from a group of venture capital firms, including Exfinity Ventures, Lumia Capital, Pipeline Capital, NexStar Partners, Unshackled Ventures and Explorer Group.

The funds will be used for product development and marketing.

The Palo Alto and Bengaluru-based firm provides virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences on mobile devices to firms using a multiple stack approach. It develops content and network stacks for VR and AR applications and claims to process high-end graphics 10 times faster than other stand-alone mobile AR/VR platforms.

Companies looking to develop VR/AR content are usually ill-equipped to host high-quality graphics.

GridRaster claims it solves this problem by hosting the underlying infrastructure on the cloud and managing loads across servers independently. This helps to optimize VR/AR content within the available bandwidth at the lowest latency possible. The company claims to have around 11 technology patents to process high-end VR/AR content.

GridRaster is currently working with a select group of clients including Osterhout Design Group, Steel Wool Studios, telecom firms and other firms in industrial, aerospace, automotive and retail sectors.

It was founded by ex-Qualcomm employees Rishi Ranjan, Dijam Panigrahi and Venkata Ramana Dass, who are also alumni of Georgia Tech, and IIT Kharagpur.

“With new capital, we will work towards maturing the product for specific enterprise and customer use cases as we continue to establish GridRaster as a standard platform of choice for cloud-powered high-end VR/AR. We will also look towards strengthening our development team,” Rishi Ranjan said in a joint statement.

The VR/AR space in India is gaining popularity among investors in recent times. Last month, cricketer Chris Gayle picked up a minority stake in a Bengaluru-based AR start-up FlippAR. Gayle also invested an undisclosed amount in another Bengaluru-based AR start-up named IONA.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.