holoride Completes Series A Funding Round
Automotive Tech Leaders Join Forces as Terranet Leads holoride’s Double-Digit Million Euro Investment Round
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We are excited to announce that we have completed our Series A investing round, collecting €10 million in first closing and earning the company a €30 million valuation.
The round was led by Terranet AB, developers of advanced driver-assistance software (ADAS) that specifically addresses safety and comfort through precise, fast, and intelligent sensor technology. Other co-investors in this round include a group of Chinese financial and automotive technology investors, orchestrated by Jingjing Xu, an investment professional specializing in partnerships and go-to-market strategies for China. Amongst this syndicate is Multi-Dimensional Connectivity (MDC) Limited, a leading investor in the automotive industry and shareholder of Aston Martin. The round of investors is completed with Schell Games, the largest full-service educational and entertainment game development company in the United States, and existing shareholder Audi.
With the capital having been raised, we will ramp up talent acquisition, expand our offering for the content creator community and strengthen our international position as we prepare for market launch next year.
We’re excited that cutting-edge automotive technology and premium content creation are represented in our new, expanded group of investors, as well as the core markets of our business with excellent partners from Europe, China, and the U.S.
said Nils Wollny, CEO and co-founder of holoride. “Integrating Terranet’s capabilities to generate a low latency view of the world into our tech stack can significantly enhance the holoride experience and become our next leap forward in changing in-vehicle experiences for good.”
We are building nothing less than the world’s first immersive in-vehicle media platform. By processing motion and location-based data in real-time, holoride enables the creation of content that adjusts to travel time and route, and as a result, is perfectly in sync with the passenger’s journey. As part of its investment, Terranet will work with holoride to enhance the real-time, in-car XR experience by incorporating aspects of its versatile sensor tech software to ensure precision, speed, and intelligence as vehicles move safely and quickly through their environments. The cooperation between the two respected category leaders opens a new vertical for Terranet’s VoxelFlow™ technology by reusing 3D event data for XR applications, like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).
“This collaboration enables Terranet to expand our addressable market while also getting access to the leading automotive manufacturers that will be using holoride. Combining our ultra-fast 3D sensor technology with holoride’s gaming and XR experiences will revolutionize the everyday car trip, providing more meaningful experiences for passengers. As a key investor (and collaborating partner) we strongly believe in holoride as a superior risk-return investment.” said Pär-Olof Johannesson, CEO of Terranet.
As a part of the deal, Johannesson will join holoride’s Advisory Board. Terranet's Chairman of the Nomination Committee has also undertaken to ensure that Wollny is elected to the company's board.
With the upcoming market introduction of holoride and our ambition to integrate it in our cars in 2022, we are taking the in-car experience to the next level and leverage the way of how we are delighting our customers,”
commented Sven Schuwirth, Senior Vice President Digital Experience & Business at Audi. “That perfectly fits to the Audi strategy to extend our digital ecosystem as well as our ambition to offer our customers the best experience.”
We feel humbled to have gathered such a strong group of investors and partners from across the globe. This also proves that holoride is here to stay. We are now eager to launch our next company phase and accelerate towards market launch in summer 2022. Exciting times ahead!
About holoride
German startup holoride creates an entirely new media category for passengers by connecting Extended Reality (XR) content with data points from the vehicle in real time. These data points include physical feedback, like acceleration and steering, traffic data, as well as travel route and time. holoride technology provides a new type of immersion into any kind of VR content, creating a breathtaking, immersive experience, and significantly reducing motion sickness. The tech startup was founded at the end of 2018 in Munich, Germany by Nils Wollny, Marcus Kuehne, Daniel Profendiner, and Audi, who holds a minority stake in the startup. It was hailed “Best of CES” four times (Las Vegas, January 2019), recognized as one of the 100 Best Inventions of 2019 by TIME Magazine and is part of the global innovation platform “STARTUP AUTOBAHN powered by Plug and Play.” In 2021, holoride went on to win the prestigious SXSW Pitch and was also named Best in Show.