Byte, Hillhouse, and Sequoia are all investing in the metaverse, how do they each vote?

The news of the Metaverse is refreshing every day.

Recently, Zhongqu (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. has undergone industrial and commercial changes, adding a number of shareholders such as ByteDance affiliate Beijing Quantum Yuedong Technology Co., Ltd., and ByteDance holds 6.6667% of the shares. At the same time, the company's registered capital increased from about 1.6262 million yuan to 1.9514 million yuan, an increase of 20%.

Zhongqu Technology is a VR digital twin cloud service provider, doing 3D real scene reconstruction. The founder Gao Xiang studied 3D optical inspection during his Ph.D. study at Tianjin University, which belongs to the field of 3D topography research, mainly to restore the real 3D world with advanced technology. This paved the way for his subsequent entrepreneurship.

This is the third Metaverse-related company that ByteDance has invested in in just a few months. At the end of August this year, ByteDance acquired Pico, a VR software and hardware manufacturer, at a premium of nearly 9 times and $1.5 billion (about 9.7 billion yuan). Earlier, it also spent 100 million to invest in the game company Code Qiankun, which is a metaverse concept.

Some commentators believe that Byte’s accelerated investment rhythm of buying, buying and buying marks that it has entered a stage of arm-wrestling with several strong opponents in the metaverse field. After all, Facebook has changed its name to "Meta", and Tencent is preaching the concept of "full Internet". Bytes is currently focusing on VR devices, immersive social platforms and games. Only by accelerating the layout can we stay behind.

In addition to the technology giants, leading investment institutions have also launched the layout of the Metaverse. In the primary market, Hillhouse Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Wuyuan Capital, ZhenFund and other institutions have all started the layout of the Metaverse track, involving companies ranging from technology engines, virtual platforms, virtual idols, to game companies, VR /AR projects, etc.

Previously, augmented reality (AR) technology company Nreal announced the completion of more than 100 million US dollars in Series C financing. Weilai Capital and Yunfeng Fund were the lead investors, and old shareholders Hillhouse Ventures and Sequoia Capital made additional investments.

In August, Hillhouse Ventures and Sequoia also jointly invested in a company action physics engine company Motphys (Mouxianfei), the company's self-developed physics action engine Motphys, which has the ability to display and integrate character actions and simulate reality. physical effects, etc. This engine saves developers the work of typing a lot of code. The development team only needs to set the parameters, and these effects can be simulated by the motion physics engine.

Hillhouse Investment Technology, Sequoia smashes the game

Since Hillhouse started to do Hillhouse Ventures, the early-stage investment market seems to have ended the dominance of the Sequoia family. Of course, VC is a competition and cooperation game, and the top projects will inevitably attract excellent investors from all walks of life. However, from the evaluation and selection of projects by the two institutions, different understandings of the new popular track "Metaverse" can still be seen.

Regarding the action physics engine company Motphys, Li Qiang, a partner of Hillhouse Ventures, said: Not satisfied with the existing mainstream development architecture, the high-performance deterministic action physics engine technology independently developed by the Mouxianfei team can fully mobilize the computing power and achieve multiple Platform, physical action simulation and collaboration in more complex scenarios, thus effectively improving development efficiency.

Zheng Qingsheng, a partner of Sequoia China, said that Sequoia values the rich practical experience of the Motphys team, especially in the operation and management of the game industry, which makes them understand the needs of game development and game users. Sequoia believes that the company will become an enabler for many gaming companies.

It can be seen from the viewpoints of the two institutions that they have different understandings of the same project. Hillhouse pays more attention to the underlying technology, while Sequoia prefers immediate applications, such as games. This can also be seen from the layout of the two metaverses.

Hillhouse’s most important investment in the metaverse concept so far is Xiaoice (formerly Microsoft Xiaoice), which was led in July. Although the investment amount was not announced, Xiaoice was directly promoted to a unicorn after this round of financing. XiaoIce Company is well known by the image of "Girl Xiaobing", which is very close to the popular concept of virtual human in the recent metaverse, but in fact, the company's core business is to complete the "perfect artificial intelligence framework with the largest amount of interaction in the world".

Regarding this investment, Hillhouse said that "I believe that artificial intelligence technology is not only the language of the future, but also the foundation and revolutionary interactive tool for the operation of the future world", so I believe that the framework developed by the XiaoIce team will become this change. The underlying tools and infrastructure behind.

In addition, the layout of Hillhouse in the direction of the Metaverse also includes Yuanxiang Weisi, Granite Technology and Miaoru Technology, which are jointly invested with Tencent. Yuanxiang Weisi is positioned as "a technology company aiming at the true Internet", focusing on introducing cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud rendering, video encoding and decoding, and large-scale system engineering into the process of digital world generation, providing consumers with online and offline services. Comprehensive interactive experience.

Grain World Technology was founded by Wu Xiaomao, a computer doctor who graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Grain World is engaged in product development of intelligent rendering and digital modeling technology, and is committed to "making human-computer interaction in the digital world simpler".

The Metaverse puts forward extremely high requirements on computing power. The current computing power architecture can no longer meet the needs of the Metaverse for low threshold and high experience. Edge computing can promote the development of computing power to a certain extent and clear obstacles for the development of the Metaverse. Miaoru Technology, which Hillhouse Ventures invested in at the beginning of this year, focuses on the research and development of the underlying infrastructure software of distributed edge cloud Infra Software, and is committed to simplifying, automating and intelligently providing complex edge IT infrastructure to global customers.

After the establishment of Hillhouse Ventures, hard technology has obviously become its main focus. It is reported that in its interior, the "tech content" of the project is an important basis for deciding on investment. It is not difficult to understand its choice in the metaverse plate.

On the Sequoia side, the most recent investment in the metaverse is Gather, a virtual interactive platform where users can work, socialize and learn, as well as build custom, interactive virtual spaces for family dinners, rock bands Shows, birthday parties, escape rooms, study sessions and even weddings.

Another huge investment from Sequoia is a $1.25 billion financing of Rec Room, an F2P social gaming platform. According to media reports, Sequoia even set a KPI internally, "to invest in 50 metaverse game companies this year."

According to Zuckerberg, the Metaverse will be an upgraded version of the Internet: an Internet where people can "be in" rather than just "watch and use." In this sense, it can also be said that the Metaverse is the next-generation Internet, or even the ultimate Internet. For the rise of the new generation of "Internet", whether the entrance is the underlying technological innovation or the experience of all-round upgraded game social networking, it seems that Hillhouse and Sequoia have made different choices.