CEO & Founder, ManageXR - The Infrastructure Layer for Enterprise XR
He was deploying VR headsets to children's hospitals when he realized: the software to manage them at scale simply did not exist. So he wrote it.
Across thousands of managed devices worldwide
Healthcare, training, education, retail
Led by Rally Ventures, Dec 2021
Team of 33 spanning the globe
There is a VR penguin named Pebbles. It waddles. It honks. And it has made medical procedures slightly less terrifying for thousands of children at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.
Luke Wilson built Pebbles. Not as a startup. Not as a product demo. As a real thing, for a real child, in a real hospital ward. He was an undergraduate at Stanford studying computer science - and instead of waiting to graduate, he designed and taught one of the university's first courses in VR software development. Then he took what he learned across the street, partnered with the Stanford CHARIOT Program, and started making immersive experiences that helped distract pediatric patients during painful procedures.
That detail - a penguin, not a business plan - is the key to understanding everything that came after.
After graduating, Wilson founded Mighty Immersion with a specific mission: deploy VR headsets to 200+ children's hospitals across the United States. He partnered with the Starlight Children's Foundation. He built mindfulness apps, physical therapy tools, distraction experiences. He was not thinking about enterprise software. He was thinking about whether a kid with an IV in their arm could breathe a little easier.
But deploying hundreds of VR headsets across dozens of hospital sites creates an immediate, grinding operational problem. The devices run out of battery. Content needs updating. A headset in Sacramento crashes and no one in the IT department knows why. There is no remote troubleshooting. There is no fleet dashboard. There is no centralized control.
Wilson looked for the software that would solve this. It did not exist. Standard MDM solutions - the tools companies use to manage fleets of laptops and phones - had not caught up to the unique requirements of XR hardware. The OS architecture was different. The use cases were different. The deployment context was completely different.
So Wilson built his own. And then he realized every organization trying to deploy XR at scale was about to hit the same wall he had.
Device management solutions have been around for years, but until recently, there hasn't been a viable option for VR and AR devices.
- Luke Wilson, CEO of ManageXRJay Borenstein, who lectures at Stanford on VR and entrepreneurship, first met Wilson when Wilson was his student. Years later, Borenstein joined Rally Ventures and led ManageXR's seed round. Same room, different chairs.
You're deploying VR headsets across 200 children's hospitals. Every device is a potential failure point. Remote support is impossible. Content updates require someone physically present. You search for a solution. Nothing exists that fits.
Wilson builds his own MDM for XR. It works. Other organizations deploying VR - in retail, training, manufacturing - find out it exists and want it. The internal tool has an audience of thousands.
Every Apple enterprise knew they needed Jamf the moment someone had to manage a fleet of MacBooks without it. Every XR enterprise is about to have that same realization about their headset fleet. ManageXR is the answer before the question gets loud.
Pico ships every headset in the United States with ManageXR already on it. In enterprise, being the default isn't luck. It's recognition that you've solved the problem better than anyone else who looked at it.
ManageXR is what IT teams reach for when a company decides to deploy XR at scale and realizes that "just plug in the headset" stops working after about fifteen devices. The platform handles app and file distribution, home screen configuration, device health tracking, remote troubleshooting, firmware management, custom content delivery, and role-based access control - across Meta, Pico, and HTC Vive hardware.
Monitor device health, battery status, and usage analytics across an entire XR fleet from a single dashboard. No more dispatching IT staff to physically touch devices across hospital floors or training centers.
Push apps, files, and firmware updates to every device in a fleet remotely. Custom home screens, kiosk mode, device lockdown - configure the full user experience without being in the room.
Role-based access control, device profiles, and clinical-grade security compliance. Because a VR headset in a hospital is still a medical device and a point of data exposure.
In November 2021, before the seed round had even closed, ManageXR became the default MDM solution preloaded on every Pico VR headset sold in the United States. That is not a partnership. That is a category claim. Enterprise buyers opening a new headset find ManageXR already there, waiting. The best growth strategy is the one where customers start the conversation already converted.
Luke Wilson lives in Santa Cruz, California - redwood country, surf country, deliberately far from the gravitational pull of San Francisco startup culture. He hikes the redwoods on weekends. He's learning to surf. He keeps the company remote and global, with team members across four continents, because he has never believed proximity was a requirement for doing good work together.
His guiding phrase is borrowed from the kind of person who has actually built something with other people: "go fast alone; go far together." It is not printed on a wall. It is the organizing principle of a company that grew from a solo internal tool to a 33-person globally distributed team in three years.
What makes Wilson unusual among enterprise SaaS founders is that he arrived at the problem through compassion, not market research. He wasn't looking for a gap to fill. He was trying to help a child get through a needle without panicking. The gap found him. That sequencing matters - it means the product is built by someone who understood the human stakes of the technology before the business stakes.
His investor Jay Borenstein - who first met him when he was a student at Stanford - said the decision to back ManageXR was obvious once you understood what Wilson had already proved: that he could identify a real operational problem, build a solution from scratch, and find the customers who needed it before anyone else knew the market existed.
The XR device management market is early. Most enterprise VR deployments are still small enough that people are managing them with spreadsheets and good intentions. Wilson knows what happens next. He lived it, in hospital hallways, with a VR penguin and a bag of USB cables.
Go fast alone; go far together.
- Luke Wilson's operating philosophyOperationally grounded. Builds from lived experience, not projections. Mission-first, metric-aware. Prefers teams that can work without supervision across time zones. Outdoors as reset. Pragmatic about what enterprise customers actually need.
Every version of Wilson's career - from Weightless Studio to Mighty Immersion to ManageXR - runs through healthcare. The technology changes. The belief that technology should improve patient experience doesn't. ManageXR serves manufacturing and retail too, but its DNA is a children's hospital in Palo Alto.
Designed and taught a Stanford VR course as an undergrad. His investor Jay Borenstein lectured at Stanford on VR and entrepreneurship. The academic roots of XR in Silicon Valley run directly through Wilson's story - on both sides of the classroom.
ManageXR didn't license technology or acquire a competitor. Wilson built the platform from scratch after running into the problem in the field. In enterprise software, founders who've lived the pain build better products than founders who've modeled the pain.
Deployed VR headsets to more than 200 children's hospitals across the United States through Mighty Immersion - without an existing roadmap for healthcare VR deployment at that scale. The operational knowledge that process generated is still competitive advantage.
Created a VR character used by the Stanford CHARIOT Program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital to reduce pediatric procedural anxiety. Real product. Real patients. Real effect. Not everything Wilson has shipped has an ARR attached to it.
Secured ManageXR as the default MDM solution preloaded on Pico headsets in the United States. In a winner-take-most market, OEM preloads are the hardest distribution win available.
Designed and taught one of Stanford's first VR software development courses while an undergraduate - before the technology had become mainstream and before most universities had curricula for it.
Presented at AWE USA 2021 and 2022 - the leading global XR conference - on enterprise XR deployment at scale. Featured alongside major enterprise customers including Brink's Security.
Wilson's ambition for ManageXR is not incremental. The XR device management market is, right now, the smallest it will ever be. Every organization that eventually deploys fifty VR headsets will need what ManageXR provides. Every hospital system, every employee training operation, every retailer running interactive demos - they all hit the same operational wall Wilson hit in a children's ward in Palo Alto.
The question is not whether enterprise XR grows. It is whether ManageXR is the default infrastructure layer when it does. The Pico preload suggests they are well positioned. The seed round - led by the investor who knows Wilson's capabilities from a classroom - suggests the people with capital agree.
The real aspiration is to make XR deployment feel like phone deployment - something IT teams can do confidently, at scale, without custom engineering on every project. That is what Jamf did for Apple. That is what ManageXR is doing for XR. The market is earlier. The upside is larger. And the founder, unlike most enterprise SaaS CEOs, has literally held a VR headset over the face of a terrified child and understood why getting this right matters beyond the ARR.
Jamf made it possible for enterprises to manage thousands of Apple devices. Before Jamf, IT teams did it manually, expensively, inconsistently. ManageXR is making the same play for XR hardware - before the enterprise XR market reaches the scale that makes the need obvious to everyone. First-mover advantage in infrastructure software compounds fast once the hardware wave arrives.
XRHealth runs VR therapy deployments through ManageXR. Brink's Security trained hundreds of front-line employees using VR managed through the platform. Healthcare. Security. Training. The use cases are diverse; the infrastructure problem they're all solving is identical.