STRIVR nabs $16M to train the future workforce in virtual reality

Though some of the biggest names in tech are wholly focused on getting consumers to strap into VR, there has been an increasing amount of movement in companies adopting virtual reality to help train employees.

STRIVR, one of the VR training startups leading this movement, announced today that they’ve pulled in $16 million in a new round led by GreatPoint Ventures. The company has raised $21 million to date.

The startup, which initially began as a project to help the Stanford football team train in VR, has made some major strides with big partnerships of late; they partnered with Walmart last year to train employees going through their worker training centers.

The company’s training products are largely based around interactive 360-based video, which in addition to being easier to produce and experience, are also less hardware intensive and can be used on lower-end systems, like Facebook’s $199 Oculus Go.

A few weeks ago, the startup announced that Walmart would be sending 17,000 Oculus Go headsets across thousands of stores loaded up with training materials from STRIVR. CEO Derek Belch tells me that the company now has 27 Fortune 500 customers that encompass “pretty much every industry.”

“We’ve really been thinking about how we build the team and strategically go after scale for the last several months,” Belch told TechCrunch in an interview. “That’s what this new capital with GreatPoint is about, more hiring and other operational things associated with bringing more people on to take on more customers.”