Curiious, the virtual reality company behind the Opera House Vivid show, raises $1 million in pivot to corporate metaverse

Sydney virtual reality startup Curiious has found a new niche for its technology, helping companies embrace 3D worlds for customer engagement, job training and marketing. 

The veteran visual content business Curiious, best known for its Vivid Opera House projections, this year featured the late artist John Olsen, has raised $1 million led by seed VC Galileo Ventures and existing backers. 

Four years ago, the company raised $2 million for plans to revolutionise training and education via a virtual reality platform, Curiious IQ, an idea subsequently refined for business to improve customer engagement and product announcements using the metaverse. The company has has been around for nearly 25 years with a focus on creating story-driven immersive experiences.

The latest funding injection will be used to accelerate product development, sales and global expansion.

Curiious CEO Michelle Schuberg said the latest iteration of the business enables users to build a connected community that stays engaged over time, making it highly appealing to people and culture teams looking to recruit, onboard, train and retain talent. Sales and Marketing teams also use Curiious to keep media, partners and consumers abreast of their latest developments and announcements.

The immersive platform lets people interact in 3D environments, accessing livestream video presentations, collaboration tools, games, on demand content and more.

Brands such as Johnson & Johnson MedTech have turned to Curiious to develop and educate a variety of business critical audiences, while Peugeot uses it to engage with media globally. 

Schuberg said the result is deeper, longer lasting connections with the information shared as well as with each other, with the delivery can be scaled for user groups of any size.

“We are thrilled to have the support of Galileo Ventures as we continue to build on Curiious’s offering as an immersive, enterprise ready communications platform providing improved engagement and actionable data to some of the world’s biggest brands. Partnering with Galileo is particularly exciting given their deep domain expertise and passion for the industry,” she said. 

Galileo general partner, James Alexander said the Curiious SaaS platform significantly improves business outcomes through increased productivity, streamlined access to information and heightened engagement. 

“Galileo Ventures is excited to invest in Curiious, a company we believe is building a new category of enterprise communications software,” he said.

“We believe many of the behaviours and trends we see in advanced games, like rich 3D worlds and interactions, will be rapidly adopted by enterprises with Curiious becoming the centre of ‘3D enterprise communications’.”