VR treadmill company Virtuix launched a crowd-based investment campaign late last year to further scale Omni One, its consumer-focused VR locomotion device. Now, the campaign’s second phase (Series B-2) has come to an end, garnering the company over $3 million.

The company’s Series B-2 round has come to a close, which offered Series B Preferred Stock to investors via crowd-based platform StartEngine, making for a total of $3,272,865 raised from over 1,300 investors. Overall, this puts its entire Series B round at over $18 million raised.

While Omni One is largely pitched as an at-home consumer device, replete with optional Pico 4E headset for $3,495, its latest round is also positioning Omni One as a potential platform for military training programs with the launch of Omni Mission Trainer (OMT), a military training system.

Created in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force, Virtuix OMT is designed to allow soldiers move physically in 360 degrees inside realistic VR environments while carrying their actual weapons, gear, and equipment, which includes team-based training for 12+ soldiers.

With its latest funding round now complete, Virtuix is also now boasting a $201.13 million valuation, which is partially based on its pre-IPO stock price—currently valued at $6.22 per share. Notably, as a privately held company, Virtuix stock is not publicly traded on major exchanges.

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Founded in 2013, Virtuix initially started its journey on Kickstarter with the launch of the original Omni, going on to raise $1.1 million from backers. Since then, the company has attracted over $40 million in funding from major investors such as Mark Cuban, Maveron, & Scout Ventures.

Too boot, the company says it has now sold over $18 million worth of products to major companies such as Dave & Buster’s, and currently has over 400,000 registered players to date. Additionally, Virtuix says its factory can produce “up to 3,000 Omni One units a month.”

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Andrew Jakobs

    OMT with their actual gear.. I hope they check their weapons extra careful for not containing live ammo, haha.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: the revenue so far hints at a few thousand treadmills sold over the last decade, calling into question why they need production facilities able to produce "up to 3,000 Omni One units a month."

    I wasn't familiar with Dave & Buster's, but it is apparently a restaurant and event/entertainment bar chain with a focus on (video) games. They probably buy Virtuix Omni Arena installations, a sort of ready made 22'*17'/6.7m*5.2 room-in-a-room VR multiplayer setup with four Omni treadmills, allowing four players to participate in a custom VR experience at the same time.

    The only price for Omni Arena I found was "about USD 200K", with financing starting at USD 2900 per months, and suggested fees of USD 15 per person for 15min, or up to USD 600 for hourly rentals of the whole arena. If all the USD 18M in products sold to Dave & Buster's and similar companies came from Omni Arenas for USD 200K, Virtuix sold 90 of these featuring a total of 360 Omni treadmills. And the 400K registered players would be people who payed USD 15 each of no doubt fun playtime. youtube_com/shorts/h4TwcVuPBo4

    In reality they will have sold more Omni Ones for only USD 3.5K plus older, cheaper models, but we are probably still talking low four figure unit numbers. So having facilities that can crank out 3000 of them each month seems rather optimistic, unless they expect to sell them in tens of thousands to the military. Given how much of a niche device omnidirectional treadmills are in the already niche VR market, mostly because what sounds like a neat concept in theory turned out to be a much more limited experience in reality, I'd be astonished if the U.S. Air Force found it compelling enough to mass deploy it as part of their standard training. And I would have expected that out of the US military branches, the army could find more use in a VR training device that lets soldiers run around on virtual ground wearing full gear incl. weapons than the Air Force, which very likely has already spent billions on VR, but mostly for flight simulators.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2126c76710724f1c9b4f7edb93c62dfe238f10d0e8753cd00c9b5f7ddd0811c9.jpg

  • NicoleJsd [She/Her]

    after trying out some movement solutions that redditors said are "great experience" I am very skeptical to any of such gimmicks being actually not super annoying but seamless and natural

    • johngrimoldy

      I agree. However, it's great to see that this type of thing continues to move forward. Perhaps this particular design and concept isn't the "one". Eventually some company will hit the mark.

    • Sumiter

      I have this device and i can say its not walking but its close after you spend a few hours in the system. This system is plug and play. Meaning you can unbox it and set it up in like 15 minutes. Once setup it take maybe 2-3 minutes to be "in game".

      the others from what i have read and experienced have a waist strap and you basically bend over and walk in a very odd position. The omni one has a different arm and harness that keeps you upright and more natural. The base is also a patented base meaning no one else can use it w/o license. This is a very good unit, worth $3500… thats a personal choice I got mine at discount as an early investor.

      its fun, interesting and the tech is amazing. You can quite literally walk in a video game.

      PS. you can also connect it to PC for other more high fidelity experiences. Nothing like telling you wife you are going for a walk just to jump into 4k modded Skyrim for and hour or 2 and walk around.

  • Ondrej

    designed to allow soldiers move

    So another one going back to military industry.

    Remember how Palmer get out of military to bring VR to the masses? It was called Oculus Rift.

    90s called. They want their entire VR industry back.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: The problem is largely how to make money in a market that Meta dominates thanks to billions of ad revenue pumped into MRL each year, which severely limits which products can sell enough to break even. A number of companies that "went back" very likely just wait for the consumer market to become viable for them again, and will return if they manage to survive long enough.

      I think this development is more about available budgets and small markets than falling back to the 90s VR market. Consumers are very price sensitive, as Meta selling way more Quest 3S with inferior optics compared to Quest 3 shows. To play in this segment, you have to sell both hardware and software in huge numbers to distribute the development cost and still be able to turn a profit from a small margin.

      So a company that doesn't reach those large numbers goes for an enthusiast and/or professional market, like HTC did once they no longer could compete with Meta's almost infinite financial resources driven by Facebook and Instagram ads. The Vive Focus Vision consumer version starts at USD 1200, but if you add a couple of extra trackers, this easily doubles, and business users pay even more for the hardware and yearly support contracts. This allows surviving with a lot less sales, even if the specs aren't that much better than on consumer HMDs.

      And companies going really high end face an even smaller group of customers. Headsets like the 2022 VRengineers XTAL 3 MR start at ten times the price of the Vive Focus Vision, which started at four times the price of Quest 3S. The Varjo XR-4 Focal Edition at USD 10K or Varjo XR-4 Secure Edition at USD 17K will sell to a few very large companies, but usually target military use with way larger budgets than even enterprises.

      Virtuix went through all these stages. The 2013 kickstarter targeted consumers, going as low as USD 250 for dish and shoes, requiring to build the rest yourself, or about USD 500 for a complete system. Which was nowhere enough to turn it into a viable business, and sales stayed low. So they turned the treadmill into a mostly professional device selling at much higher prices to entertainment venues, again not in huge numbers, but with a healthier margin. And now they turn toward military use, where each unit will probably cost more than 20 times as much as the current base Omni One Core for PCVR at USD 2600.

      But while companies like HTC pretty much left the consumer market, simply because they couldn't compete with Meta's cheaper products, Virtuix have stayed in the (high end) enthusiasts market even after turning towards professional users. And there is a chance that you'll still be able to buy an Omni One for gaming even if their Air Force projects is successful, and maybe even cheaper, at the base technology will probably allow for a lot more civilian reuse than XTAL or Varjo HMDs with very expensive displays/optics.

      I don't think we are going back to mostly industrial/research/military VR usage. A lot of "leaving VR towards professional/military" use is mostly a reaction to Meta owning the whole consumer market, with only a small enthusiast market also buying more expensive devices like the Bigscreen Beyond or Omni One. USD 2600 for an Omni One is still a lot of money for most, but the Kickstarter price indicates that the production costs are much lower, most of it is to spread the high development costs over only a few users.

      With XR hopefully picking up speed with HorizonOS, visionOS and AndroidXR HMDs becoming both better and cheaper, we may still get to a market size where a company like Virtuix can sell 100K units to customers at significantly lower prices thanks to economies of scale, and until this happens in the not so near future, they can hopefully survive and continue development by charging the military the obscene prices only an entity not bound by concepts like return of investment can afford.