Presence Capital founders Amitt Mahajan (left) and Phil Chen.
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Farmville, HTC Vive creators behind new $10M seed fund for virtual reality

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

Serial entrepreneur Amitt Mahajan, the co-creator of FarmVille, believes that the best opportunity for game startups is at the beginning of a new platform. That’s why he has teamed up with former HTC executive Phil Chen and startup veteran Paul Bragiel to create Presence Capital, a seed fund to finance games and apps for virtual reality and augmented reality.

Paul Bragiel of Presence Capital.
Paul Bragiel of Presence Capital.

VR companies have already raised a lot of capital, with 234 companies bringing $3.8 billion in the past five years, according to a report by VB Profiles.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.