Entrepreneurship has learned that recently, XR chip research and development company “Universal Gravity” announced that it has received a total of 100 million yuan in angel rounds and Pre-A rounds of financing within half a year. The angel round was led by Gaorong Capital, and jointly invested by Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital and Jinshajiang Venture Capital. The Pre-A round was led by a world-renowned XR leader, Gaorong Capital, Sequoia Capital, Lenovo Ventures, Yaotu Capital, Chaiyuan Ventures, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Qiji Chuangtan, Yuanyang Capital, Five Source Capital and other investment institutions jointly invest. The financing will be used for technology research and development, talent acquisition and market expansion.
XR (Extended Reality) is the collective name for VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), and MR (Mixed Reality). With the rise of the metaverse wave, XR, the entrance to the metaverse, is expected to become the next-generation mobile computing platform, bringing all-round changes to production and life.
In the field of XR, chips and related software and hardware technologies are the core underlying technologies, which determine the final user experience. Founded in September 2021, Gravity took the lead in the research and development of XR chips. “Hardware development is the basis for the development of the XR industry. Chips, displays, and optics are the value nodes with the highest cost of XR hardware equipment, and XR dedicated chips are optimized terminals. An important part of the hardware device experience.”
For a long time in the past, VR headsets, AR glasses, etc. have all shared the chips of mobile phones, tablets and other products. Traditional chip suppliers often refit general-purpose chips to adapt to new VR and other equipment. At present, mainstream chips in the industry cannot support Retina-level clarity, there is still room for optimization in performance. However, having dedicated components is a sign of a product’s maturity, and it is also the only way to go. With the increasing shipments of VR equipment and the maturity of XR-related research, XR-specific chips are on the horizon.
The CEO of Gravity has led the research and development team at Apple for many years, and has accumulated a lot of experience in XR hardware direction; the core founding team members have rich experience in chip research and development and the consumer electronics industry. An important position in product research and development, with profound accumulation in chips, display, perception, image vision and AR/VR, and industry-leading technical experience, capabilities and vision in related fields.
“Compared with other domestic players who develop XR-specific chips, the Gravity team itself has the cutting-edge capabilities of XR hardware component research and development, so it has the core competitiveness of designing supporting chips from the perspective of terminal experience and terminal performance,” the founding team pointed out, “The ability of the team is relatively rare in China. We are recruiting talents and plan to recruit 100 more people before the end of the year.”
Since its establishment, Gravity has made significant progress in XR chip research and is expected to complete the mass production of the first-generation chip in 2024. This chip will be the first chip platform in the industry specifically for XR applications, highly customized and highly integrated for hardware applications, and has customized designs for hardware-accelerated processing in display, perception, image and other aspects.
Committed to solving four major problems: first, to relieve the rendering load of the main SoC general platform, and to achieve 8K/120Hz more intelligently; second, to use video transmission (VST) to solve the “big problem” dizziness of VR hardware terminals The third problem is to enhance the image quality effect of VR/MR, including dynamic high-quality display/optical enhancement and camera processing; In perception performance, computing resources can be flexibly allocated.
Yue Bin, founding partner of Gaorong Capital, said: “The popularization of AR/VR equipment must be supported by professional chips. At present, only a few top technology companies in the world are engaged in R&D in this area. The stack has a deep understanding. During the past period, a group of outstanding talents from world-class technology companies such as Apple and Meta have gathered here. The team has vision and capabilities in different fields such as chips, systems, and algorithms. The chips developed by the company will be Promote the progress of AR/VR devices and enhance the user experience.”
Li Xiaojun, partner of IDG Capital commented: “In history, the outbreak of new consumer terminals often brings investment opportunities in upstream core components. ARVR devices have extremely high requirements for display quality, and special processors are needed to provide computing resources. Gravity The team has accumulated profound experience in this field, and the experience is scarce, IDG is optimistic about the company’s development prospects!”
Luo Xu, managing director of Lenovo Venture Capital, said: “XR chips are in the early and climbing stages of the industry, and XR smart chips are the core of user and product experience, which is of great strategic significance. We hope to invest in a different XR smart chip technology route from Qualcomm. , Only in this way can there be opportunities for differentiated competition. Based on Apple’s many years of research experience, the Gravity team adopts a new dedicated smart chip technology route, and creates a new smart chip by hardening algorithms such as display, perception, positioning, and AI into the chip. The CEO thinks carefully and considers problems comprehensively. The core team has had cooperation experience and running-in with the founder; The big judgment of future evolution will not be only Qualcomm, and there will be a new ecology for localization. Lenovo will also use its own resources to support Gravity in terms of supply chain, product system, and global market sales.”
Yang Guang, partner of Yaotu Capital, said: “AR/VR/MR will be a huge incremental market for consumer electronics in the future. The founding team of Gravity has deep technical accumulation in the field of AR/VR/MR, targeting AR/VR/MR. Special chips and algorithms have been developed for key technologies that need to be broken through, and we look forward to gravitational empowerment of consumer electronics brands to launch AR/VR/MR devices with better user experience and performance, helping users enter the Metaverse Era.”
Liu Yu, vice president of 37 Interactive Entertainment Investment, said: “The market potential of XR as a next-generation mobile device platform is huge. The multiplayer online of the Metaverse requires high concurrency, low latency and strong interaction, which puts forward more challenges for the XR chip layer. For the ultimate computing power and experience requirements. In addition to optical display, the chip is the key point that needs to be broken through to improve the high-quality experience of mobile devices, so a dedicated XR chip is necessary. We believe that the founding team of Gravity has the world’s leading Market insights can create platform-level products that are suitable for the ultimate form of the Metaverse from the product definition.”
Zhang Yutong, managing partner of GSR Ventures, also said: “With the further clarification of application scenarios, XR will become the next-generation mobile computing platform, gradually achieving scale in the consumer and industrial fields, of which the chip is undoubtedly the highest value node. Gravity team deposit With the leading experience and capabilities at home and abroad, it has the strength to overcome the high threshold of XR underlying capability research and development, solve the industry pain points through special chips that support multi-modal XR applications, and seize the entrance to the Metaverse. We believe that Gravity will continue to break the boundaries of XR chip platform ecology , to drive the development of the overall industrial chain.”
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Related events
- “Universal Gravity” received a total of 100 million yuan in angel and Pre-A round financing within half a year, focusing on tackling XR-specific smart chips2022-08-13
- It is reported that Apple has slowed down the improvement of iPhone chips and made every effort to make Mac chips2022-07-04
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