How Rothenberg Ventures got ahead of the VR investing craze

With virtual reality now seemingly everywhere, it’s easy to think that the technology came out of nowhere. Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift two years ago opened the floodgates. HTC and Samsung have headsets on the market, too, and Sony will release one later this year for the PlayStation 4 console. And each of these devices is now surrounded by an ecosystem of software, hardware, games, and content. It’s easy to see all that’s happpened in hindsight, of course. But less obvious is the role that early investors have played in the adoption of virtual reality, and how far it has yet to go before truly entering the mainstream.

VentureBeat talked to Brandon Farwell, a partner at Rothenberg Ventures, at the recent F50 Global Summit Conference. For a relatively small firm, Rothenberg may be having an outsized impact through its River Incubator, where 13 entrepreneurs received $100,000 funding last year. According to Farwell, the firm has made about 100 investments in total, with 30 of them falling into the “frontier categories” of technology like AR, VR, AI and drones.