We raised $5 million!
Teddy Mitrosilis
Co-Founder @ Alto Studios → An Executive Communications Firm | Managing Partner | Operating Advisor | Author @ The Process
Catching up after a couple wall-to-wall days of shooting to end the week and then some travel, so I’m a few days behind the news but wanted to make sure I hit it quickly here.
STRIVR announced a $5 million Series A round of fundraising last Wednesday!
It was a super exciting day for all of us, not so much because of the press and the applause but because of what the announcement represents for the future of our company.
In the first 18-ish months of existence, STRIVR was a sports training company. In 2016, we stepped into enterprise training, and we will open 2017 sprinting ahead with the expansion of our platform, believing we can take a proven model of training athletes and apply it to any company or employee trying to improve. That is an incredibly invigorating mission, and also daunting in some ways.
What we’re attempting to do has never been done, and I don’t say that in an attempt to boast. I mean it literally and humbly. How will it go? What mistakes will we make? What mistakes can we avoid? How can we best utilize data? We’re not quite sure, because this has never been done. We will learn and adapt, hopefully both with speed.
If you haven’t read Zaw Thet’s Medium post on STRIVR’s announcement, take a few minutes to do so. Zaw is a Partner at Signia, which led our Series A round, and our new board member. He cleanly lays out the excitement in the VR/AR space, the main challenge and why he chose to invest in STRIVR. I want to highlight two points from his post that hit on why this pivot for our company is so fascinating.
- Corporate training is a $77B market in the U.S. growing 10–15% a year
When most discuss the VR or AR market, they focus on the revenues currently generated by the tech?—?“VR is currently a X million dollar market.” In the VR/AR case, those numbers are relatively low because of the nascency of the technology.
Looking at the market a company intends to target with the tech instead seems like a clearer view of the opportunity, which is why this nugget Zaw had in his post was staggering and brilliant. We think there are so many fundamental problems of inefficiencies in enterprise training that can be improved with practical virtual reality applications. Not everything should be addressed with VR, but there’s a lot that can be, which is why we’re so excited about this next step.
2. We are committed to the mission of elevating human performance
This is really the thing.
I joined STRIVR for the exact reason our fundraise announcement represents?—?the opportunity to help people be the best they can be at whatever they do. That’s our “why,” in a sense.
At our essence, we’re not really a virtual reality company?—?we’re a human performance and training company that uses technology to try to make people better. Right now, that method happens to be virtual reality.
The most exciting part about the next couple years is this will all build on itself. Our expansion into enterprise training isn’t going to detract from our efforts in sports training. We want to go as deep as possible in both, because what we learn, the feedback we receive and the data we collect can inform and improve us across all fronts.
If this fundraise represents our Phase 2 as a company, I think having a super robust feedback and data science loop will be the thing that launches us to Phase 3. At that point, it will be an extremely fun race to see how fast we can innovate, how much we can evolve our products and how many people across the world we can help become better.