U.K. startup Ndreams raises $3M for ‘year one’ VR games

Ndreams, a virtual-reality game creator in the United Kingdom, has raised another $3 million to create more original titles that you can play using VR goggles.

Virtual reality is a hot new space with a lot of hype and promise. Digi-Capital estimates VR will be a $30 billion market by 2020, driven mostly by games. And VB Profiles recently reported that 234 VR companies have raised $3.8 billion in funding and created an enterprise value of $13 billion — all on the promise of a big market.

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So far, only Samsung has launched a VR device: the $99 Samsung Gear VR for mobile VR apps. Next year, new systems are coming from HTC, Valve, Sony, and Facebook’s Oculus VR. Ndreams wants to be one of the pioneering game developers at the dawn of the VR market. It is making its own original titles, and it may publish games from other developers, too.

The new funding follows upon a previous round that the company raised in January 2015. Since then, the company has released its VR arcade shooter Gunner and a game called Perfect Beach for the Samsung Gear VR.

The studio is based in the city of Farnborough in the Hampshire region of England. The funding comes from Mercia Technologies, a tech-focused investment company, which also provided the money for the previous round. Mercia is based in the U.K., and it is publicly traded.

Patrick O’Luanaigh, chief executive of Ndreams and former Codemasters and Eidos creative director, said in a statement, “I’m delighted to be strengthening our relationship with Mercia Technologies. This additional investment allows us to extend our capabilities as a publisher and accelerate our efforts as we head into 2016 — the big ‘year one’ for VR. With these new hires, we’ve raised the bar in terms of our studio’s skillset, knowledge base, and quality of our future output.”

The company has had an early start, as it has been working on virtual-reality software since 2013. Ndreams is now working on The Assembly, a title coming out next year on multiple high-end headsets. The Assembly is a dramatic two–character adventure where players need to make tough moral choices and unravel the mysteries within a top-secret underground bunker.

Ndreams has been around since 2006. The studio previously created games for Sony’s PlayStation Home virtual world, which debuted on the PlayStation 3 console. That experience went out of fashion, and as a result, Sony shut it down. But Ndreams sold more than 1.8 million virtual items, and it had 18 million visits to its free-to-play Aurora space.

Mercia’s $3 million round of investment will be divided into two separately installments of $1.5 million each.

Ndreams has recently hired Tom Gillo, vice president of development, formerly of Sony’s London Studio, where he worked on PlayStation VR games; lead designer Jamie Whitworth, previously of Rocksteady Studios where he contributed to the Batman: Arkham trilogy; Richard Fabian, code development manager, previously of Frontier Developments and Rockstar Games; and senior audio designer Matt Simmonds, who has worked in games audio for more than 25 years.

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