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Much recent attention has been on Japan-based mobile social media company Gree’s US expansion plans, led by Naoki Aoyagi, CEO of Gree International. He led last month’s launch of Gree’s $12m corporate venturing fund, GVR Fund, which will invest in virtual and augmented reality startups.
Aoyagi said: “The GVR Fund highlights Gree’s commitment to the potential of virtual reality as an emerging platform. We not only see ourselves as a content developer but as an investor as well. We want to create the same values we successfully did in the past through investments in companies when the mobile platform took off.”
The fund will be managed by Teppei Tsutsui, Gree VR Capital’s managing director, but its limited partners include Colopl VR Fund, the $50m virtual reality-focused venture capital fund launched by game publisher Colopl in December 2015, and social networking company Mixi.
GVR’s first two portfolio companies are VRChat, the US-based developer of a social virtual reality world-building platform that secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from venture capital firm Rothenberg Ventures in February this year, and Spaces, for which Gree has not disclosed any information.
Since his move to join Aoyagi in the Bay area of California in 2014, Tsutsui has also led Gree’s investments in Dibs Technology, PlateJoy, PeerSpace, Cribspot, Human.co, CareerDean, Make School and Rise Labs.
Prior to this, Tsutsui was director in charge of corporate planning and strategic finance for Gree. In this role over three years he led the three largest acquisitions by the company – the $140m acquisition of Pokelabo in October 2012, $210m Funzio deal in May 2012 and $104m purchase of OpenFeint deal in 2011 – and its global expansion. For its Asian deals, the company has Yusuke Amano, CEO of Gree Ventures for the past five years.
