Looking back at a year full of milestones and growth
Recapping the year 2021 with its many highlights, hitting major milestones, facing obstacles in undoubtedly challenging times, and accelerating into 2022.
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2021 was another year full of milestones for us that we have been able to achieve as a team - a rally of hitting targets and launching the next phase in our journey to change in-car entertainment for good. Of course, the ongoing pandemic and restricted office policies have not necessarily helped but we grow with our challenges. And growing we did!
We’ve now grown to more than 30 holoriders and a number of new team members will be onboarding in the next couple of weeks. We believe that the team is our greatest asset and, therefore, also our most important source of success. That’s why we tried to enjoy get-togethers whenever the circumstances would allow for it, by sharing drinks, food, and some funny anecdotes of daily startup life. It also helps to get to know each other better and helps to continue building our unique holoride culture.
2021 also allowed us to be live on stage again and share holoride’s vision. In summer, we were able to showcase holoride to a number of game studios during our US roadshow in California. It was also a great opportunity to offer demo rides. And, finally, we had major news to announce by introducing our very own cryptocurrency. Receiving all that positive feedback is an incredible feeling for us!
Let’s have a look at some of those milestones and not spoil too much.
March 20 - Winning the 13th annual SXSW Pitch in two categories
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Honestly, we couldn’t believe it when they called out holoride as the winner in the ‘Entertainment, Gaming & Content’ category at the 13th annual SXSW Pitch! But that was not all - on top of that we were also recognized as ‘Best in Show’ out of all categories. What an honor to win such an important prize!
April 13 - Taking home the ‘Deutscher Computerspielepreis’ in “Best Innovation and Technology”
This year’s DCP was a purely digital event, honoring companies in 15 different categories. We were beyond thrilled to be awarded “Best Innovation and Technology”. We feel honored to have received the most important price of the German games industry.
April 22 - Completing our Series A funding round, collecting €10 million in first closing
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What an accomplishment! We completed our Series A investing round which earned us a €30M valuation! The round was led by Terranet AB, Schell Games, a group of Chinese financial and automotive investors, and our existing shareholder Audi.
July 22 - Introducing our Elastic SDK and Creator Space at GDC 2021
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Our partner Unity offered us their stage and spotlight at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2021, and we seized it as we had big news to share! Finally, we were able to present our Elastic Software Development Kit (Elastic SDK) for the very first time with a detailed walkthrough of some of its most exciting features. Now every content creator is able to build breathtaking content with our Elastic SDK, via the holoride Creator Space!
July 31 - Aug 7 - Doing an incredible US Roadshow through California
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Cali here we come! At the end of July, we packed our bags and flew to the US west coast. One week packed with exciting meetings from LA to San Francisco with our spaceship in holoride colors. We were able to showcase the first fully elastic experience to many different game studios in person - definitely a trip to remember!
Sept 7 - 12 - IAA Mobility in our hometown Munich
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The first ever IAA Mobility in Munich and right on our doorstep. Having such an important and huge event made us really happy as we are deeply rooted to our hometown, Munich. Within 48 hours, our demo ride schedule was fully booked. We were overwhelmed about the interest in holoride and beyond proud to give many hundreds of visitors a taste of what the future of in-car experiences will look like. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth and took a ride with us!
Oct 3 - 17 - Making holoride accessible for everyone at Autostadt
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Why stop after this awesome experience? That’s what we thought too, and decided to continue offering holorides with Volkswagen ID.3s at the renown Autostadt in Wolfsburg. Visitors booked their free of charge rides and immersed into a mystic world with holoride.
Nov 4 - Introducing RIDE: holoride’s very own cryptocurrency
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The last two months of the year have been intense for us! After announcing our partnership with Elrond in May this year, we released our own cryptocurrency in November. Launching our RIDE token is a huge step for us and our ecosystem and we achieved incredible results in our public sale: In less than 24 hours, more than 39,000 people passed the KYC purchasing 116,500 tickets, worth over $22M, with 10,000 lucky winners in the end. We’re still buzzing from these weeks and are now looking forward to see what happens next year!
holoride today and our plans for the future
With a lot of new talents on board we conclude this year with 31 holoriders. And we can already share that, starting in January three new holoriders will join and enrich our fantastic team.
Growing is so exciting! If you want to join our ride or know someone who might be a great fit for our talented team, check out our open positions.
This is only a selection of currently open positions we are hiring for:
Executive Assistant/Chief of Staff (m/f/d)
Graphics Engineer (m/f/d)
Product Owner - Applications (m/f/d)
Crypto Community Growth Manager (m/f/d)
Backend Engineer (m/f/d)
In 2022, we will be hitting another major milestone in our roadmap as we prepare for our highly anticipated market launch in the second half of the year. Stay tuned for a lot of great things that will happen in the upcoming year. Rest assured, we’re still deeply focused on ‘making transit time count’, making our vision of ‘adding thrill to every ride’ come to life!
Our team is now off for some well-deserved time off in between the years. We wish you all a wonderful holiday season with your loved ones.
Be well and Happy New Year to each one of you!
Your holoriders
About holoride
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. In April 2021, holoride raised €10 million in its Series A funding round led by Terranet AB, earning the company a €30 million valuation. That same year, holoride won the prestigious SXSW Pitch and was also named Best in Show. It has been hailed “Best of CES 2019” four times, 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”.