Pi Labs’ investment in MOONHUB
Next-generation VR Training Platform
We can finally share that we have led MOONHUB’s £2 million Seed round, along with our new friends Ada Ventures, 1818 Venture Capital and several angels.
Background to our investment
One of the main concerns in our industry is the fact that labour shortages have been in decline since 2008 — particularly in the construction industry. Despite the world managing to get out of the global financial crisis, this was an area of real estate that didn’t particularly recover, despite increasing house prices, rentals and a general growth of the global construction industry, which would lead one to believe that, with more to build and more money to be made, more jobs should follow. Several technologies are starting to help fill the gap (such as 3D printing, use of robotics for simpler tasks), but, when it comes to hiring and upskilling employees, not much has been done.
According to Beroe Inc., the learning and development (L&D) market size was already worth $367 billion by the end of 2020 and expected to keep growing to $402 billion by 2025. However, this is one of the areas with the lowest retation rates, as scientific research shows that people forget 70% of new information within 24 hours, with L&D programmes having rates as low as 5–10%.
VR is seen by many as the solution that will significantly increase engagement and retention rates. PwC reported that VR has the potential to boost the global economy by $1.5 trillion until 2030 and attribute at least of fifth of that can be attributed to L&D applications.
How did the investment come about
While we had looked at the space a few times and looked at a number of solutions, we had not found a start-up that had exactly what we were looking for. Introduced by Georgina Nwabueze (who joined us through the Future VC Programme), Dami, Hannah and Vinh were building The MOONHUB — a VR-training platform that focuses particularly on the software component to deliver a best-in-class L&D experience to employees. They had managed to secure the likes of JustEat, Here East, Royal Opera House, Sports Interactive and many more since then.
🤝🏿 Source of intro: Georgina Nwabueze, who joined us from the Future VC Programme.
An overview of the company
Industry — Metaverse
Location — London, United Kingdom
Founding year — 2016
Problem — Real estate (and many other industries) suffer from significantly low retention rates when it comes to L&D initiatives.
Solution — MOONHUB is a VR-training platform that is hardware-agnostic, focusing on providing not only an immersive experience to users, but also backing L&D performance with data.
Why we invested
As with all of our investments, meeting and working together with team for the past 6 months has been a joy and further proof that they were the right founders to back — they came to us with a fully functioning product, signed customers (UK and Europe) and growing revenue 3x YoY. In this particular case, we were not only impressed with them as a founding team, but also with the people they managed to surround themselves with and how their product was incredibly easy to set up, despite being a ‘metaverse’ start-up.
What’s next
The purpose of this round is to continue to scale operations, including further international expansion, and continue product development to take their platform to the next level.
From meeting the team up until our investment, we became sure that they will be able to tackle the $400 billion L&D market but, more than anything, that in a world with diminishing attention spans, we will be able to feel engaged again.
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