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
At the close of 2015, immersive-computing capital is splitting into two layers: platform-scale money and specialist seed. Facebook had already doubled its $250M VR content commitment and added a separate education fund, while hardware-side operators were moving down-stack — Presence Capital puts a FarmVille co-creator (Amitt Mahajan), an ex-HTC exec who knows the headset ecosystem (Phil Chen), and a repeat accelerator founder (Paul Bragiel) on the check-writing side with just $10M.
That matters because the corpus shows what seed-stage VR/AR companies need to graduate: Penrose Studios later raised a $10M Series A for narrative VR, and ad-platform Immersv pulled in $10.5M with HTC Vive participating — follow-on rounds that only exist if someone funds the earliest experiments first.
First-order effects
- VR/AR game and app founders gain a dedicated first check from operators whose networks — Mahajan's social-games background, Chen's HTC ties — double as distribution and hiring pipelines.
Second-order effects
- Corporate players get aligned early-stage backers: HTC's Vive arm already co-invested alongside VCs in Immersv, and a fund run by an ex-HTC executive makes that kind of strategic-seed pairing easier to replicate across the portfolio.
- Facebook's content-fund spending now competes at the margin with independent seed money for the same studio talent, pushing specialist funds toward bets the platforms won't make — education-adjacent, retail, and enterprise work like InContext's later raise.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, early immersive-computing financing settles into a two-tier structure — platform giants buying content breadth while operator-led microfunds pick winners — meaning the studio supply chain for VR/AR gets built ahead of proven consumer demand, with failure risk concentrated at the seed tier.
The trend: Immersive computing is acquiring its own venture stack, with operator-led seed funds like Presence Capital forming the first-money layer beneath platform giants' content funds.