Oculus VR, the company that's developing the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles you want for Christmas, has secured another $75 million in Series B funding. This is in addition to the $16 million it raised in Series A in June , which it must have placed on top of the $2.4 million pile of cash it raised in the initial Kickstarter campaign .
The round closed Friday morning, and was led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Wired reports . If you're the kind of person who cares about the inside baseball of Silicon Valley tech companies, you're probably impressed by that fact. Andreessen Horowitz was founded by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, and Ben Horowitz, who sold his company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for a cool $1.6 billion. Together they went on to invest and make even bigger bucks on little companies you may have heard of like Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and others.
In short, the investment lends Oculus a non-negligible amount of credibility, at least in Silicon Valley circles. Not to say that it lacked credibility before this. With investors like Cliff Bleszinski, John Carmack as Chief Technical Officer , and most importantly, praise from PC Gamer , it was already one of the most exciting companies in the gaming industry.
Of course, another $75 million couldn't hurt in solving the problems Oculus has to solve before it's ready for a mass market. We last reported on the device in October , when Oculus VR revealed it was getting closer to hitting 4K resolution and solving motion sickness problems.
Apparently Andreessen Horowitz decided to invest in the Oculus VR after Marc Andreessen himself and two other partners toured its headquarters in Irvine, California, where they saw a new prototype that made them into believers. Maybe they saw the same prototype Cliff Bleszinski saw just a couple of days ago.
— Cliff Bleszinski (@therealcliffyb) December 11, 2013 December 11, 2013
