Samsung quietly acquired VR app studio VRB, sources say for $5.5M
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : Tweets: @ingridlunden Tweets: Ingrid / @ingridlunden : This seems like an almost quaint amount of money, given the other deals in the news today. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung has spent 2017 assembling an in-house AI and VR stack through quiet, unannounced buys: it paid around $215M for assistant startup Viv Labs per a March filing, launched a $150M NEXT Fund aimed at pre-seed-to-Series-B startups in VR, AI and IoT, and later picked up Greek voice-replication firm Innoetics. The VRB purchase fits that cadence — another low-profile tuck-in, this time a VR app studio, at just $5.5M.
The price point matters against the wider market: VC deal flow in VR and AR had already tripled after Facebook's Oculus buy, and comparable studio exits ran higher — Verizon's AOL paid a reported $10-15M for VR studio RYOT, and Apple would go on to pay a reported $30M for headset maker Vrvana. Samsung paying mid-single-digit millions suggests it is buying teams and output cheaply while the funding wave lasts.
First-order effects
- VRB's studio joins Samsung's device-and-software organization, giving Samsung internal VR app-building capacity alongside the Viv Labs assistant work rather than relying on outside developers.
Second-order effects
- Rivals building headsets and content pipelines face the same talent squeeze: with AOL's RYOT deal and Apple's Vrvana purchase on the board, small VR studios can shop themselves between hardware giants, lifting exit prices above what Samsung paid here.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, VR's post-Oculus funding boom ends not in independent studios scaling but in their absorption as cheap acqui-hires by consumer-electronics platforms — consolidating VR software talent inside a handful of hardware companies.
The trend: Consumer-electronics giants are quietly absorbing small VR studios as tuck-in acqui-hires, converting the post-Oculus venture funding wave into in-house platform talent.