October 5 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian venture capital fund Morningside Hill has invested about 1 million euro ($862,800) in Sofia-based virtual reality (VR) development company ZenART, local media reported.
"We will use the Morningside Hill investment for expanding the team and increasing our capacity so that we can take on more projects,” local business news outlet The Recursive quoted ZenART team as saying on Monday.
With the current investment ZenART will aim to double the number of its employees which currently stands at 30 and includes professionals from the cinema, media, and entertainment industries.
In the short term, the company will aim to land its current projects successfully and to acquire more bandwidth. Their long-term goals, apart from extending their catalog, are to break into new business verticals. ZenART's team says that they would enter the cinematography, education, and automotive industries even though there are many more industries that would benefit from VR in their training, production, or prototyping processes, according to the media report.
"We are already seeing the vast applicability of 3D across multiple industries and expect that in the future the use cases will increase even more. ZenART’s visualization technology will find great applicability in the cinema industry as it saves creative businesses money and time. The same applies for corporations that can use VR to create immersive showroom experiences, training, and visualizations of buildings and products," The Recursive quoted Pavel Velkov, managing partner at Morningside Hill, as saying.
The Morningside Hill VC fund, launched in 2019, has 38.5 million euro under management to be invested in equity (or equivalent) minority positions in 25 to 30 companies. It comprises public funds of 33.3 million euro provided by the Fund of Funds (FoF) in Bulgaria under the EU's operational programme Innovation and Competitiveness, co-financed by the European Structural and Investment Funds for the 2014-2020 programming period, according to information published on Morningside Hill's website.
($ = 0.862767 euro)