Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The 2017 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, which concluded today in Las Vegas, featured boatloads of new technologies, driverless cars full of new technologies. Many of these advances, particularly Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality, have great appeal to marketers.

AI, AR, and VR are poised to be transformative technologies for marketers — if not right this minute. For the most part, aside from some tentative and necessary experimentation, marketers remain focused on what can help them immediately.

This cross section of 12 quotes from the CES sessions indicates that marketers, for now, will pay more attention to more familiar acronyms, such as CM (content marketing); DDM (data-driven marketing); and CX (customer experience) than to AI, AR, and VR:...

The funding landscape in AR/VR has been defined by large rounds to the exceptionally well-funded Florida-based startup Magic Leap, which has raised nearly $1.4B in venture funding. After raising massive Series B ($542M) and Series C ($780M) rounds, the stealth AR company’s financings tend to distort industry funding trends.

To identify well-capitalized AR/VR startups that aren’t named Magic Leap, we used CB Insights data to see which companies are raising big financing rounds and building war chests to help build out the AR/VR ecosystem, which some theorize could become the next major computing platform.

Topping the list of big AR/VR rounds was Laguna Beach, California-based NextVR, which focuses on virtual reality broadcasts of live events. NextVR recently raised an $80M Series B round.

The next biggest deal went to Palo Alto-based cinematic VR platform Jaunt. The company raised a $65M Series C in September of 2015.

In third was UK-based Blippar, which produces a mobile AR visual search app. Blippar last raised a $54M Series D in March of 2016.