Europe’s VR ecosystem continues to flourish with more and more companies

Europe’s virtual reality ecosystem continues to grow with more and more companies entering the sector, according to a report from VR venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund and Belgian WebVR consulting and software development company LucidWeb.

The VR Fund and LucidWeb publishes the report every half year to take the pulse of Europe’s VR industry. Last year, the study identified more than 300 companies in the VR space, which has since grown 57% in the last six months.

Based on this data, the VR Fund and LucidWeb create the European VR Industry Landscape (pictured above), a snapshot of Europe’s biggest and most innovative VR companies, which now stands at 188 companies with the UK leading the pack and France coming in second.

Gaming is still the most competitive area within VR in Europe with a 38% growth in the number of VR gaming companies since 2016 but VR for the enterprise also saw a 55% growth in the first half of 2017. Education, another hotly tipped sector for VR, nearly doubled the number of companies. Activity in the hardware side of things was slower with only two new additions to the landscape but this year’s report also added advertising as new a sector.

You can view more details on the companies from the landscape on LucidWeb's public Trello.

“The VR industry continues to expand in Europe and next to the U.K. and France, Sweden has caught up in terms of the number of high-performing startups across the industry,” said Leen Segers, CEO of LucidWeb.

_(Disclosure: LucidWeb’s Leen Segers is a former COO of tech.eu.)_

“For sub-industries in VR, as with the first version of the EU VR landscape published in early February, the number of companies focusing on user input, 3D tools and enterprise applications are growing quickly,” she said. “Additionally, young startups in these verticals have easy access to capital, while mature companies in these spaces are more likely to go public or become acquired by major companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Starbreeze.”

This week tech.eu published its first State of the European VR Industry investment report, which analyses 487 VR startups and Europe’s biggest and most significant funding rounds, exits, investors, and acquirers since 2015.