Sawhorse Productions has acquired the extended reality studio HabitXr.
Sawhorse announced the acquisition deal today, April 23, with the company’s co-founder and chief innovation officer Nic Hill sharing the news while on stage at the WorldBuilder Summit, a conference for companies and workers in the user-generated content space. Hill declined to share the specific terms of the deal or its valuation of HabitXr in an interview with GamesBeat, but said that it was more than a simple equity swap, with “cash changing hands.”
The goal of the acquisition was to help widen Sawhorse’s platform offerings and grow its client base. As a creative agency largely based in the user-generated content space, Sawhorse helps build virtual experiences and integrations for brands and IP holders on UGC platforms like Fortnite and Roblox. HabitXr primarily builds experiences on Meta’s Horizon platform, where Sawhorse has expanded its business over the past year, often by enlisting HabitXr’s services.
“We’re very platform-agnostic; obviously, all the money is on Roblox right now, but we’re bullish on a wide range, because we don’t know who the winner is going to be eventually,” Hill said.
As part of the acquisition, HabitXr founder Benjamin Veaner has joined Sawhorse as the agency’s new director of emerging platforms, bringing his staff of 4 employees along to increase Sawhorse’s overall head count to just over 50 employees.
“Our team was remarkably successful for our size, but there are limitations when you’re a five-person startup,” Veaner said in a written interview. “While we had the opportunity to work on a bunch of great projects over the years, working with Sawhorse supercharges our team and provides a depth of resources that we just didn’t have independently.”
Like Sawhorse, HabitXr is a creative studio that builds immersive experiences for brands and IP holders. Its largest client is Meta, reflecting the company’s deep roots in Meta’s Horizon platform.
“There are so many emerging platforms that we want to sink our teeth into,” Veaner said. “Joining Sawhorse gives us the space not just to explore those platforms, but to really become experts in these new spaces.”
At the moment, it’s unclear exactly what shape Meta Horizon will take in the future, with Meta announcing last month that the company would sunset the platform’s virtual reality tools and features in June 2026, then partially walking back that promise the following day after a wave of backlash from Horizon users and creators. Regardless of its VR plans, Horizon will continue forward as a UGC platform largely accessed via mobile and desktop devices — and Sawhorse is bullish on this future, viewing Meta as a growth area as the ecosystem shifts from VR toward mobile-first experiences.
“It’s an awkward time to be investing in a Meta-Horizon-first company,” Hill said. “But our perspective is, we’re here for the long haul, and I still am bullish on the impact that Meta is going to make in this space.”
HabitXr is Sawhorse’s first acquisition, reflecting the continued growth of the business — and the expansion of the user-generated content space in general.
“When we were a lot smaller, it was kind of impossible to think about acquiring companies,” Hill said. “But as you grow and you take up more of the market share, sometimes acquisitions just make the most sense for how you continue to scale, and this is the first time we put that into practice.”