NOLO VR Closes New Round of Financing as 5G Booming

Healthcare, Technology, Financials Author: Sirui Zhou Jul 30, 2019 03:51 PM (GMT+8)

Visual reality interactive technology company NOLO VR (凌宇智控) announced Series A+ of financing of hundreds of millions yuan as 5G enabled technology and applications are gaining traction.

Image from NOLO VR website

Visual reality interactive technology company NOLO VR (凌宇智控) announced Series A+ of financing of hundreds of millions yuan as 5G enabled technology and applications are gaining traction.

Founded in 2015, the VR provider focused on VR core technology development. Its marked patented motion tracking technology PolarTraq allows high accuracy tracking of less than 2mm by fusing optic, acoustic and radio signals. So far, it has invested more than CNY 100 million (USD 14.5 million) in R&D, holding 125 patents in 12 countries.

NOLO VR has cooperated with Google, Huawei, Xiaomi, Pico, iQiyi, Skyworth, and Dapeng to promote products in education, entertainment, travel and real estate.

Technology development enables the redistribution of labor sources from repetitive labor-intensive tasks to content-driven jobs. At the same time, technology brings new ways of sending content to human beings. VR is one of them. 

Gao Tianyao, Partner at Legend Star, said that 5G is the next investment direction, but current investments are more about network construction. "From the application level, current investments are related games and videos," he said. 

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) projected the virtual reality market would exceed CNY 60 billion (USD 8.7 billion), and AR market over CNY 10 billion (USD 1.45 billion) in 2018. It is estimated that the compound annual growth rate of the global virtual reality industry will exceed 70% in 2017-2022. 

China's three major operators have also begun to adopt VR for promotion. In July, 2018, China Mobile (Fujian) launched a home scenario business He Cloud VR("和·云VR"), becoming the world's first operator cloud VR business trial. It sets VR standards for platform, network, terminal and content. In September 2018, China Unicom released the "5G+Video" promotion plan, and Cloud VR was considered as the key innovation business of China Unicom 5G plan. China Telecom has adopted cloud VR as a key product in smart homes business.

NOLO VR has cooperated with the three operators to deploy a 5G cloud VR experience in the flagship stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu, allowing some users to experience cloud VR in advance.