The Most Promising VR Companies and Startups: Where They Are Now

Compatibility and source notes

This list was first written in 2018–2020, so several entries have moved on. Oculus is now part of Meta's Reality Labs; Meta announced in October 2021 that the Oculus brand would be phased out in 2022, and the Rift and Rift S headsets are discontinued. Meta's store now lists the Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S, the company's current standalone headsets. Marxent now operates as 3D Cloud, and the old VR Listing website redirects to a different domain that we couldn't load. Surgical Theater, NVIDIA, YouVisit, Teslasuit and UNIGINE are still active, but Teslasuit offers its suit only as a developer kit through early-access applications, not to consumers. Checked 24 September 2026.

Historical background: Oculus launched its Kickstarter campaign for the Rift in 2012. The consumer Rift followed in March 2016.

Where each company stands now

We checked each company’s official website (and, for Oculus, Meta’s store and public records) to see what has changed since the profiles below were written.

The most promising VR companies and startups on our list

Oculus VR, LLC (now Meta Reality Labs)

• Founded: 2012
• Parent company: Acquired by Facebook in 2014; now part of Meta’s Reality Labs division
• Headquarters (at the time of writing): 19800 MacArthur Boulevard, Suite 200, Irvine, CA 92612
• Website: https://www.meta.com/quest/ (oculus.com was the original address)
• Their vision: “To give people the power to experience anything”.

What they do

Oculus develops VR technology, such as headsets, hand controllers, room sensors, and earphones. They are best known for the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset (with controllers, room sensors, and earphones). The original Rift was replaced by the Rift S in 2019, and the Rift S was discontinued in April 2021, so any Rift you find today is old or second-hand stock. Our Oculus Rift review covers the original headset.

Here's why you should pay attention to Oculus

The Oculus Rift was the first commercially produced VR headset for everyday people…well, ordinary people with a decent bit of money to drop on a VR system. Since then, they have been the gold standard for VR headsets.

There are two downsides to the Oculus Rift, though. First, it works in conjunction with a PC. So, you need to purchase (or already have) a pretty decent PC with a very good graphics processor, which means a total system can cost well over a thousand dollars. Second, you are tethered to a PC so you can’t leave the vicinity of the PC. In September 2018, Oculus announced a new headset coming in spring 2019, called the Oculus Quest. Quest will retail at $399 with hand controllers and will not require a PC or smartphone to work. It has better sensors (6 degrees-of-freedom) than Oculus Go (Oculus’ low-end headset) and comes close to the Oculus Rift’s sensing abilities. It also has better resolution than the Rift (and Go), though a lower refresh rate than Rift. Why Quest will have a big impact, though, is that it deals with those two major drawbacks of the Rift.

The Oculus Quest runs on its own internal processor and has built-in sensors. So, it’s not tethered to anything, allowing free movement, and you don’t need to have a high-end gaming PC. For only $399, you have everything you need for a great VR experience…well, other than some games or other VR software. This makes Quest much more accessible to the mainstream user and will boost the market.

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Surgical Theater, LLC

• Founded: 2008
• Headquarters: 23645 Mercantile Rd., Suite M, Beachwood, OH 44122 (previously Mayfield Village, OH)
• Website: https://www.surgicaltheater.com

What they do

Surgical Theater develops professional medical virtual reality software and viewing technology designed to help train medical students and help neurosurgeons both perform surgery and communicate with patients. According to its website, the current product range covers SyncAR (augmented reality visualization for spine and cranial surgery), PlanXR (surgical planning and rehearsal), BrainSTORM (epilepsy care), ConveyXR (patient engagement) and XR Studio (multi-user case review).

Here's why you should pay attention to Surgical Theater

Surgical Theater has developed a platform that integrates with standard imaging technology (MRI, CT Scan, DTI, etc.) to create a patient-specific, three dimensional, virtual model of a patient’s brain. This technology allows neurosurgeons to have a 3D model of their patient’s brain when planning a surgery and even allows them to practice the specific surgery in advance.

Surgical Theater also provides a way for the neurosurgeon to better inform patients by showing patients exactly what they will be doing during the surgery. This can improve the doctor/patient communication and relationship.

In addition, these real-life surgical situations can be shared with medical students, enhancing their education by allowing them to practice complex brain surgery in a virtual environment. Already, some of the top academic hospitals have begun using Surgical Theater, “including UCLA, New York University, University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Mayo Clinic, Mount Sinai, and now, Stanford University.” (source)

Considering the high cost of medical malpractice suits and serious effects of surgical errors during neurosurgery, there is a lot of pressure to eliminate as much error and risk from these surgeries as possible. Surgical Theater offers a significant way to do that. Its website now lists partners including Mayo Clinic, Stanford, Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, UCSF, Texas Children’s Hospital and Houston Methodist.

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VR Listing Inc.

• Founded: 2016
• Headquarters (at the time of writing): 77 King St W, #400, Toronto, Ontario M5K 0A1, CA
• Website: https://www.vrlisting.com (now redirects to vrlportal.com; status unconfirmed)

What they do

VR Listing Inc. is a virtual reality platform for real estate rental and sales. They allow real estate agents and companies to create immersive, 3D, virtual tours of properties to aid in sales and rentals.

Here's why you should pay attention to VR Listing

Virtual reality is just starting to emerge in the field of real estate. Sure, anyone who’s looked for a house or apartment in the past few years has seen many listings with “virtual tours”, but these are usually just a glorified photo slideshow or, at best, a slideshow of 360° photos.

VR Listing provides real estate companies with the ability to create fully rendered, three dimensional, photo-realistic tours of properties. Potential clients are able to move through the 3D environment as though they were actually at the property.

Property tours are the most effective tool a real estate agent has to sell a property, but often time and distance prevent clients from being able to visit a property or at least delay the visit until they have more free time. That’s why you see so many open houses on the weekends. VR Listing, however, gives potential buyers the ability to tour a property any time and from the comfort of their own home or a real estate agent’s office.

VR Listing also offers virtual staging where they seamlessly insert furniture and decorations into an empty space. Staging is a time-tested strategy for selling a property. Properties that are staged sell faster and for a higher price, but staging can be expensive. Virtual staging allows real estate agents to stage a property without having to purchase or rent the furniture and decorations.

Virtual listings are the future for real estate sales and rentals. VR Listing is at the forefront of the true virtual tour market and that market is only going to grow.

When we checked, vrlisting.com redirected to vrlportal.com, which did not load, so we couldn’t confirm whether VR Listing still offers these services.

Marxent Labs LLC (now 3D Cloud)

• Founded: 2011
• Headquarters (at the time of writing): 433 Central Avenue, Suite 218, St. Petersburg, FL 33701
• Website: https://3dcloud.com (marxentlabs.com now redirects there)
• Their vision: “Our vision is to simplify major, semi-custom home purchases and make them as easy as buying an airline ticket”.

What they do

Marxent Labs provides a cloud-based platform for retail stores to offer virtual stores, product displays, and showrooms. In addition, Marxent Labs offers AR applications to further enhance online shopping. Under the 3D Cloud name, the company now describes its products as 3D product configurators, room planning apps, WebAR, 3D asset management and visual configure-price-quote tools, for clients such as Lowe’s, Ashley HomeStore and John Lewis.

Here's why you should pay attention to Marxent Labs

Virtual reality for both in-store and online retail is getting ready to explode onto the market. Marxent Labs is on the cutting edge for both venues. They offer the ability to scan in products for 3D rendering which can then be used in a virtual environment. Retailers can also create virtual stores with aisles and showrooms for their scanned products.

In addition, consumers can create their living space based on floorplan and then customize that space to look just like their home or workspace. The 3D products can then be placed and moved around the personalized 3D environment so customers can see exactly what a product would look like in their home or workspace.

These virtual environments can be used both in-store or online. For retailers, this can not only give an enhanced shopping experience but also reduce floor space needed for displays. Instead of having 30 couches on display, they can have a much smaller VR area where shoppers see the couches displayed virtually.

Lastly, in addition to the many other clients Marxent Labs has been working with, in 2018 they announced a deal with Macy’s, taking them into 2019 with a high-profile client. The company’s current focus, as described on its website, is web-based 3D and AR shopping tools rather than in-store VR.

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NVIDIA Corp

• Founded: 1993
• Headquarters: 2788 San Tomas Expy., Santa Clara, CA 95051
• Website: https://www.nvidia.com
• Their vision: “Build a great company and be the most important 3D graphics company in the world”.

What they do

NVIDIA is a graphics hardware development company. They produce GPUs (graphics processing units) and graphics cards for computers and other technology.

Here's why you should pay attention to NVIDIA

NVIDIA has long been a powerhouse in the arena of graphics processing and video cards. AMD’s Radeon cards occasionally come close or even catch up to NVIDIA in terms of performance, but NVIDIA inevitably pulls ahead and also consistently controls a much larger market share, especially among gamers and VR enthusiasts.

NVIDIA had been the top pick for VR applications for most of the years since the Oculus Rift Kickstarter, and in 2018 it made another giant leap forward. On 20 September 2018, NVIDIA launched its GeForce RTX 20 series with its greatly praised Turing GPUs.

These graphics cards, and particularly the Turing GPUs, offer several new advancements over previous cards/GPUs that will allow virtual reality applications to move to the next level. Real-time ray tracing, a new feature in the Turing GPUs, allows much better processing of light in the VR world. This will allow VR developers to create much more realistic environments.

Advanced VR rendering technologies, such as Variable Rate Shading and Multi-View Rendering, offer better shading and peripheral rendering as well as increased fields of view. The new cards also have additions which will make VR connectivity much simpler and more powerful.

The launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20 series with the Turing GPUs not only made NVIDIA the clear leader in VR graphics processing but set the stage for significant enhancements for VR developers. NVIDIA has released several newer GeForce RTX generations since then; for current card recommendations, see our guide to VR-ready graphics cards.

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YouVisit, LLC

• Founded: 2010
• Headquarters (at the time of writing): 20533 Biscayne Blvd. Suite 1322, Aventura, FL 33180
• Website: https://www.youvisit.com

What they do

YouVisit is an online virtual tourism platform that allows travel-related companies and other institutions to create and share 360° photos and virtual reality tours. Its website now calls it the most widely used virtual experience platform, with more than 700 partners, and links to the privacy notice of EAB, an education company that offers campus virtual tours. We couldn’t find an official statement of the ownership on either site.

Here's why you should pay attention to YouVisit

The travel industry is another huge market sector which seems to match very well with virtual reality. YouVisit is positioning itself to be a major player in the introduction of virtual reality in this industry.

Commercials for cities like to show video of particular areas in the city that people like to visit. This helps to entice people to go, but how much more would people be enticed if they could see those places in a virtual environment.

Imagine the New York tourism department giving people a way to virtually stand in the middle of Times Square or by the Statue of Liberty. YouVisit can help them do that. Other travel related companies, like hotels and destination spots/tourist attractions, are also seeing the benefits of VR.

YouVisit also provides service for companies and institutions you wouldn’t typically associate with the travel industry. For example, several colleges and universities have worked with YouVisit to create virtual tours of their campuses. Potential students like to visit campuses before choosing a school, but it can be difficult and expensive to physically visit all the schools. YouVisit offers a solution through virtual tours.

YouVisit has also worked with companies producing virtual content for prospective employees and consumer brands producing virtual showcases of their products.

The travel industry is just now starting to see the value in VR technology for increasing tourism and improving experiences. YouVisit has created a platform to provide that VR technology and has already landed some pretty high profile clients, including Harvard University, Renaissance Hotels, Eddie Bauer, and others.

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Teslasuit

• Founded: 2013
• Headquarters: Operated by Deep Divers Ltd, 85 Great Portland Street, London, UK
• Website: https://teslasuit.io

What they do

Teslasuit develops integrated smart clothing: a full-body haptic suit and a haptic glove (Teslaglove), plus software for calibration, project creation and data analysis.

Here's why you should pay attention to Teslasuit

Have you seen Ready Player One? Whatever you think of the movie itself, pretty much everyone who’s watched that movie wants one of those full-body haptic suits. If only they existed in real life…what? They do?

That’s right, Teslasuit is a VR company that has developed a full-body, 2-way haptic feedback suit. The suit combines motion tracking, haptic feedback, and biometry to more fully immerse users in their virtual reality.

They officially announced the suit in January 2018 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and returned to CES in 2019 as a CES 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree. They have been honing the technology and working with developers in the creation of software that integrates the suit.

The company isn’t just thinking about gaming, either, though no doubt gaming will be a key part of their market. They are working with developers to create corporate training programs, physical training and fitness applications, and sports training programs. They were even working with Sony Pictures Television on innovative integrations with television.

The Teslasuit was expected to be released sometime in 2019. This kind of technology can be a game-changer (pun intended), but it will likely have a slower impact simply due to the price. For their 2016 Kickstarter campaign, they had two levels of suits, the cheaper being $1500. So, go ahead and start saving up.

A consumer version never arrived. According to Teslasuit’s website, the suit and glove are offered as developer kits, you apply for early access rather than buy online, no prices are listed, and the company names research institutes, XR training providers, developers and enterprises among its users.

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UNIGINE

• Founded: 2005
• Headquarters: Yas Creative Hub, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, with an R&D center in Yerevan, Armenia (previously Clemency, Luxembourg)
• Website: https://unigine.com/
• Their vision: Making the experience of immersive virtual worlds a reality for all types of industries.

What they do

UNIGINE develops an interactive real-time 3D visualization platform for the enterprise sector. The UNIGINE SDK is used in professional simulation & training industry (maritime, ground, air, space, computer vision). It is also used in industrial digital twins, BIM, GIS, and various VR projects. The SDK now comes in Sim, Academic Research and free Community editions; version 2.22, released on 10 September 2026, added a VR multiplayer project template, according to UNIGINE.

Here's why you should pay attention to UNIGINE

Virtual reality is not only about entertainment, as many people happen to think. UNIGINE believes that immersive real-time VR technologies could contribute to every business. That’s why UNIGINE SDK is designed to push beyond the entertainment space. It combines the best of two worlds: photorealistic high-quality graphics of game engines and a lot of out-of-the-box tools and features for enterprise use.

One of the main UNIGINE focuses is the simulation and training industry. Due to the fact that UNIGINE handles huge-scale virtual worlds up to the size of the Solar System, provides cutting-edge physically-based rendering, supports geo-coordinates, and has a number of professional features, the customer can create any training system they need (maritime, ground, air, space). Virtual reality is the perfect training tool for industries where operator errors can cost human lives and serious economic or environmental damage. The advantage of UNIGINE is that joint missions of various vehicles could also be simulated. To coordinate the actions fast in a real-life emergency situation, operators of all involved vehicles must be trained simultaneously, elaborate tactics and improve collective skills within the common environment.

Additionally, it could also be applied to computer vision training. Virtual polygons enable training at a very early stage of engineering, without a ready-to-go prototype of an unmanned vehicle.

As UNIGINE deals with complex CAD data and 3D scans and handles very detailed 3D scenes (tens of thousands of dynamic objects, tens of millions of polygons), the customer is able to create a digital twin of an individual enterprise, a city block, or an entire metropolitan area. Such virtual copies accumulate digital information and help to optimize the management processes. For example, to avoid a great number of mistakes in urban planning.

As UNIGINE is tailored for industrial use, it supports multi-channel rendering, curved screens (image warping and edge blending), various sensors visualization and many more.

The company provides two ways of partnership: licensing the SDK if you have a development team or getting a turn-key solution from the UNIGINE professional services team.

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The-Parallel

• Founded: 1 January 2018
• Headquarters (at the time of writing): Unit 324, Edinburgh House, 170 Kennington Lane, London SE11 5DP, UK
• Website: https://www.the-parallel.com/
• Their vision: Virtual Reality Architects Will Change Entirely How People See the World.

What they do

The-Parallel is a VR/AR development company with offices in 6 countries all over the world. The team creates Extended Reality solutions for businesses from various industries, such as healthcare, IT, and others.

Here's why you should pay attention to The-Parallel

According to the company (these figures are its own and we haven’t verified them):

• The-Parallel has been awarded as the TOP PICK start-up in Hardware, Robotics and IoT at TechCrunch Berlin 2018.
• More than 40 cases are implemented.
• An increase in the quality of VR trainings reaches 6 times.
• 0 negative feedback and failed projects.

When we checked, the-parallel.com was publishing VR and AR guides for businesses and gave no company address, so we couldn’t confirm that the development studio described above still operates.

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The leaders

#1 Oculus VR, LLC (Meta)

Not publicly traded, but its parent company is. Facebook renamed itself Meta Platforms in 2021, and Oculus is now part of Meta’s Reality Labs division.

#2 NVIDIA Corp

Publicly traded on the Nasdaq.

#3 Marxent Labs LLC (3D Cloud)

Not publicly traded.

#4 VR Listing Inc.

Not publicly traded; current status unconfirmed.

#5 YouVisit LLC

Not publicly traded.

Final thoughts

Virtual Reality is amazing. If you’ve ever driven a racing game in VR or run around shooting bad guys in VR, you know what I mean.

However, what’s even more amazing is what’s in store for virtual reality. The technology is only in its infancy. Right now, virtual reality is seen as an entertaining experience, but it will become so much more in the future.

Imagine walking through the Coliseum without having to go to Rome. Imagine doctors performing exploratory surgery virtually without having to make a single cut on a patient. Imagine learning about the middle ages by visiting them.

The companies on this list are taking us into that future and beyond.

Which VR tech are you most excited about? Are there any VR companies you would add to our list?

Research behind this guide

Check the linked specifications and support documents, or read how we research. Original review experience stays attributed to its author.

View 11 sources

• Oculus Rift (Wikipedia)
• Reality Labs (Wikipedia)
• Meta Quest headsets (Meta)
• Surgical Theater
• 3D Cloud (formerly Marxent)
• NVIDIA corporate timeline
• YouVisit
• EAB
• Teslasuit
• UNIGINE
• The Parallel

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