December 7 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technology developer QuarkXR is looking to raise a total of 1.5 million euro ($1.6 million) to help it broaden its pool of talent in the Southeast Europe (SEE) region and boost marketing activities in the US, CEO and co-founder Krasimir Nikolov told SeeNews on Wednesday.
The company expects to collect as much as 875,000 euro of the total seed funding amount through Romania-based online tech investing platform SeedBlink, Nikolov told SeeNews in an emailed statement.
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Bulgaria's Vitosha Venture Partners will lead the round, which will see two more unnamed local venture funds participating.
"With this round, we plan to scale our cloud streaming platform and cloud infrastructure by leveraging talent from the SEE region, and we plan to hire sales and marketing people for the US market," Nikolov told SeeNews.
He added that QuarkXR intends to target clients in the telecoms, automotive, manufacturing and architecture sectors for the time being. Its use cases include remote work, collaboration, industrial training and design, among others, in both the AR and VR segments.
Founded in 2016, QuarkXR has been developing a cloud streaming platform that enables next-generation immersive computing on mobile devices using AR/VR glasses. It also focuses on third-party developers of haptic technology, such as SenseGlove, or technology that adds a touch experience to virtual visualisation.
The Bulgarian company has received support from the European Commission and the EU's Next Generation Internet initiative, which has enabled it to work with Orange Silicon Valley, a US subsidiary of Orange, which has created an ecosystem for co-operation with Silicon Valley start-ups.
Last month, QuarkXR became one of two Bulgarian start-ups that were picked to take part in German group Robert Bosch's four-month start-up accelerator programme, focusing on Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) projects.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)