Visual Vocal, the leading immersive productivity platform for team collaboration, today announces its $3.6 million seed stage financing. Led by Eniac Ventures, the funding includes investments from Scout Ventures, Spider Capital, and the Alliance of Angels, allowing the company to scale enterprise sales and continue to focus on building a transformative product.
Visual Vocal's cloud-based technology offers an enterprise VR solution enabling anyone who generates 3D files to create and drive immersive presentations, compare design trade-offs, and send or receive detailed annotations.Through Visual Vocal, key project stakeholders can easily join in-person or remotely in seconds, using a slim, lightweight smartphone accessory that folds-up pocket size when not in use.
"With continued advancements in AR and VR, the way we approach business - across all verticals - is rapidly evolving everyday. At Eniac Ventures, we believe in technologies that are helping solve collaboration and communication challenges faced by dispersed teams on large-scale projects," said Tim Young, General Partner at Eniac Ventures. "Our investment in Visual Vocal is underscored by the company's commitment to creating the highest quality immersive experience for enterprises, rapid-growth market adoption and huge opportunity across a wide variety of industries from construction and architecture to manufacturing. We are excited to help the team grow."
Visual Vocal's mobile 'VR Inbox' unifies all spherical messages, meetings, and project updates into one place, and allows publishers to set permissions to manage a user's level of participation based on their role in the project. In this way, it allows key design considerations and issues to be summarized, shared, and synced at any job site, office, or wherever is convenient, at any time. This new method of asynchronous communication allows stakeholders make rapid decisions while keeping the whole team informed - whether across the office or across time zones - without the typical burdens of in-person meetings and conference calls.
"Thanks to an advanced cloud-based infrastructure, our technology can power all stages of communication: design-phase renderings of build options, construction focused job site communication, and post-occupancy facilities documentation," said Sean B House, Co-founder & CTO, Visual Vocal. "This platform-based approach offers the flexibility to power applications for any industry that lives and breathes 3D data."
See what Visual Vocal can do.
Visual Vocal was founded in partnership with NBBJ, recognized by Fast Company as one of the world's most innovative architecture firms. "In an age of seemingly endless tools and technologies, Visual Vocal has created a completely new way to work and communicate," says Steve McConnell, FAIA, Managing Partner at NBBJ. "Visual Vocal has taken VR into a new medium-productivity-to help design teams and clients make more informed design decisions, eliminate unnecessary meetings, and include any number of stakeholders."
The virtual environments, called "V|Vs", can be hosted in real-time for more productive remote or in-person meetings. With this method, attendees are instantly connected via an audio linking technology developed by London-based Chirp. In those cases where there's no time for a meeting, V|Vs can power a self-contained interactive tour of a project while still capturing the feel of an in-person meeting. V|V messages can be left for all team members to see - whether in the real-time meeting or accessing the V|V at a later time. All feedback flows directly to project leads, eliminating wasted time and increasing overall team productivity.
"VR is just the beginning," according to CEO John SanGiovanni, who did extensive work with AR while at Microsoft. "Augmented Reality is just around the corner, and those companies with broad industry usage in the immersive productivity category will be in a highly leveraged position once AR becomes broadly available."
About Visual Vocal
Visual Vocal has forged a robust VR/AR platform to power a wide array of new immersive communication formats for complex 3D projects. Founded by John SanGiovanni and Sean B House in 2015, Visual Vocal is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit http://www.visualvocal.com and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.