Seven-figure investment for VR startup

In a sec­ond round of financ­ing, start­up Inner­space receives a sev­en-fig­ure euro invest­ment from its two exist­ing investors MAD Ven­tures and High-Tech Grün­der­fonds (HTGF), as well as a new part­ner, aws Grün­der­fonds. The com­pa­ny devel­ops vir­tu­al real­i­ty sim­u­la­tors for crit­i­cal pro­duc­tion areas in the life sci­ence indus­try, includ­ing clean rooms. The start­up will use the invest­ment to fur­ther expand its mar­ket pres­ence and use the funds to increase its sales and con­sult­ing team. Prod­uct and mar­ket expan­sion into oth­er areas of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and chem­i­cal indus­tries are also on the agenda.

Vir­tu­al real­i­ty sim­u­la­tors from Inner­space are used by big play­ers in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try in Europe, North Amer­i­ca and Japan. Employ­ees in clean­rooms use Inner­space tech­nol­o­gy to train cor­rect behav­ior, rec­og­nize rea­sons for mis­takes, learn to avoid mis­con­duct and train “expe­ri­ence through rep­e­ti­tion” in a risk-free, vir­tu­al environment.

The principle of the flight simulator translated into the cleanroom

Inner­space’s sim­u­la­tors enable crit­i­cal skills train­ing with VR gog­gles and are accord­ing­ly hand­i­er than flight sim­u­la­tors. Nev­er­the­less, they serve the same pur­pose: they min­i­mize risks from clean­room con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and make errors vis­i­ble, mea­sur­able and repro­ducible as crit­i­cal events. Because of their strong con­nec­tion to real-world chal­lenges, train­ing with vir­tu­al real­i­ty sim­u­la­tors is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more effec­tive than exist­ing train­ing and learn­ing meth­ods. “Essen­tial­ly, we are trans­fer­ring the flight sim­u­la­tor suc­cess sto­ry to the qual­i­fi­ca­tion of pro­duc­tion per­son­nel in the life sci­ence indus­try: train faster, bet­ter and haz­ard-free expe­ri­ence,” illus­trates Wal­ter Ischia, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Sales and Finance at Innerspace.

“Inner­space deliv­ers a com­plete solu­tion con­sist­ing of analy­sis and con­sult­ing by expe­ri­enced indus­try and train­ing experts, a mod­u­lar VR sim­u­la­tor solu­tion that enables cus­tomer-spe­cif­ic adap­ta­tions, as well as roll-out and imple­men­ta­tion sup­port,” adds Alexan­der Wild, who is respon­si­ble for pro­duc­tion and oper­a­tions as man­ag­ing director.

Targeted growth in the life science industry

“We are receiv­ing a lot of inter­est from the indus­try for our VR sim­u­la­tors,” reports Ischia, rank­ing the poten­tial of his solu­tion: “In Europe alone, there are near­ly 100,000 clean­room employ­ees, and world­wide there are about four times as many.” 

“The prin­ci­ples behind our sim­u­la­tor are not only applic­a­ble to the clean­room. The require­ment to train cor­rect behav­ior in crit­i­cal pro­duc­tion areas in an effec­tive, mea­sur­able and repro­ducible way exists in many oth­er areas besides the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and chem­i­cal indus­tries with far high­er num­bers than just clean­rooms, for exam­ple in laboratories.”

- Sebas­t­ian Schel­er, Co-Founder

Success in the seed phase made investors take notice

Inner­space has man­aged to grow suc­cess­ful­ly even dur­ing the cri­sis. As a result, the com­pa­ny has now been able to bring aws Grün­der­fonds on board, in addi­tion to its exist­ing investors, the Ger­man High Tech Grün­der Fonds and the Aus­tri­an investor MAD Ventures.

Christoph Haim­berg­er, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of aws Grün­der­fonds, says: “I con­sid­er vir­tu­al real­i­ty to be a great inno­va­tion that is increas­ing­ly chang­ing indus­tries and ser­vices. Thanks to the Inner­space team, train­ing in the life sci­ence sec­tor can now be rethought from the ground up. And this is just the begin­ning for fur­ther applications.”

Markus Jan­drinitsch, the respon­si­ble invest­ment man­ag­er at aws Grün­der­fonds about Inner­space: “In recent years, vir­tu­al real­i­ty has been able to devel­op from a mere gim­mick for ear­ly adopters to estab­lished use cas­es in var­i­ous ver­ti­cals. In one of the most excit­ing of these use cas­es, name­ly train­ing in crit­i­cal pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ments, Inner­space man­aged to build impres­sive trac­tion in a short peri­od of time, which we believe is due to both the high qual­i­ty of the prod­uct and the team. We are there­fore con­vinced that the invest­ment will enable them to exploit the enor­mous mar­ket poten­tial even faster than before and that there are great oppor­tu­ni­ties for future growth.”