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VR shop Penrose Studios lands $8.5M seed round

Marco della Cava
USA TODAY
Penrose Studios CEO Eugene Chung

SAN FRANCISCO - Penrose Studios, a small startup focused on creating original animated content in virtual reality, announced Thursday that it had raised an $8.5 million seed round.

Accelerate-IT Ventures led the round, with participation from TransLink Capital, Suffolk Equity and 8 Angel. A number of angel investors also contributed.

Penrose Studios was founded last year by Eugene Chung, a former Pixar employee and early Oculus Rift employee who oversaw that company's content strategy through its $2 billion acquisition by Facebook in 2014.

The investment comes as year-old Penrose begins to showcase its work publicly. At the last Sundance Festival, Chung played a short film called The Rose and I, while at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival in April he plans to screen a longer and more sophisticated VR short called Allumette. USA TODAY recently was shown a demo of Allumette; imagine watching top-notch animation but also being able to walk up to and around the action as it unfolds, what Chung calls a "fully immersive computer-generated visit" to an imaginary world.

Penrose aims to reinvent movies in VR

“This is a pivotal moment for us,” Chung said in a statement. "We’ve come a long way from the early stages of this new medium. Today’s announcement marks a milestone for the industry as well as our studio.”

Bill Malloy III, co-founder of AITV - which is focused on promising early-stage and medium-growth IT software companies - said in a statement that the investment in Penrose resulted from a belief that Chung and his two dozen Hollywood and tech world veterans were “creating something special in AR and VR (and) we want to see their work be taken to its fullest potential."

Penrose also announced that Brad Allen, executive chairman of NextVR, will join the team as a strategic advisor. Helping guide the company's creative vision is an advisor with filmmaking chops, director, screenwriter and producer Roman Coppola.

Follow USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava on Twitter: @marcodellacava

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