Co-creator of FarmVille Amitt Mahajan, ex-HTC exec Phil Chen, and startup vet Paul Bragiel create Presence Capital, a $10M seed fund for VR/AR games and apps
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Presence Capital arrives into a VR funding market already anchored by big corporate cheques: Facebook had just doubled its $250M commitment to VR content weeks before, and enterprise players like InContext were pulling in $15.2M led by Intel Capital. What was missing was dedicated seed-stage money run by operators rather than strategics.
The three founders supply exactly that pedigree — Amitt Mahajan built FarmVille at Zynga, Phil Chen ran HTC's VR efforts, and Paul Bragiel is a serial startup founder — so the fund is positioned to back games and apps at the stage Facebook's content fund and later rounds like Penrose Studios' TransLink-led Series A don't reach.
First-order effects
- Early-stage VR/AR game and app teams gain a first cheque written by people who shipped consumer hits and ran headset-platform strategy at HTC, not by a corporate development arm.
Second-order effects
- Operator-led seed funds create a feedstock for the larger rounds already forming around them — HTC Vive's participation in Immersv's $10.5M Series A shows platform owners deploying follow-on capital into what seed funds surface.
Third-order effects
- If every platform shift gets its own crop of specialist micro-funds, VR follows the pattern of prior cycles: seed specialists take the earliest risk while corporate money concentrates on content libraries and strategic bets.
The trend: Immersive-computing capital is stratifying, with operator-led seed funds like Presence Capital taking the earliest risk beneath the large corporate content funds.