Nreal a Chinese start-up Raises $40 million

China’s one of the most-watched mixed reality startups Nreal, has just secured a funding of $40 million from a group of investors in its latest Series B round. This massive funding could bring much more adoption to Nreal’s portable augmented headsets.

This round was led by Kuaishou, which happens to be the arch-rival of TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin. This funding round eventually helped the startup to establish a connection with yeh another video platform after its existing investor iQiyi, which is China’s very own version of Netflix. Just like any other video streaming sites around the planet, both Kuaishou and iQiyi is trying to make it big, when it comes to making AR content, so securing a partner who can help them with hardware can be very much instrumental for their early experiments.

GP Capital is amongst the other backers in this round. The GP Capital counts state-owned financial holding group Shanghai International Group and a major Chinese movie studio Hengdian Group as investors.

Nreal the three-year-old company’s other key partner is Qualcomm. Till date the chipmaker has played an instrumental role in China’s 5G rollout, powering major Chinese phone makers’ next-generation handsets. Currently, Qualcomm supplies the company with its popular Snapdragon processors, which in return helps the company to make lightweight mixed reality glasses that can be easily plugged into an Android phone.   

The company has also signed a deal with a Japanese teleco KDDI, and it is also working with LG’s cellular carrier LG Uplus Corp in Korea.

Thanks to the latest round of funding, Nreal’s total raise is now more than $70 million and the company believes it will eventually accelerate the mass adoption of Nreal’s mix reality technology during the 5G era.

Now, we’ll have to just wait and watch if Nreal can live up to the promise, secure some users at scale, and move beyond being only a poster child for tech giants’ mixed reality ambitions.