social-vr
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Bigscreen VR
Bigscreen VR is a California-based virtual reality company that started in 2014 as a social app for watching movies, gaming, and hanging out in shared virtual rooms, then pivoted into hardware with the Bigscreen Beyond - marketed as the world's smallest VR headset. Built for enthusiasts, the Beyond uses high-resolution micro-OLED displays, custom pancake optics, and a face cushion molded to each customer's face. The company sells direct to PC VR users who want maximum visual clarity and comfort without the bulk of mainstream headsets.
Darshan Shankar
Darshan Shankar is the founder and CEO of Bigscreen, the VR company that started as a social movie theater you could share with strangers and grew into a hardware maker shipping the Bigscreen Beyond, billed as the world's smallest VR headset. A self-described VR obsessive and UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he sold his first Y Combinator startup before turning the whole company toward virtual reality in 2014. Today Bigscreen builds quarter-pound headsets with custom 3D-scanned facepads and OLED microdisplays, ships to eight regions, and is on track to cross $100M in annual revenue.
Graham Gaylor
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
VRChat Inc.
VRChat is a free-to-use social virtual reality platform where millions of people gather every month inside worlds built almost entirely by the community. Founded in 2014 by Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey, the company has turned a Reddit-recruited Oculus DK1 experiment into one of the largest user-generated virtual worlds on the internet, with concurrent users routinely topping 100,000 and a creator economy now monetized through a digital currency, subscriptions, and a marketplace.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.