Founder and CEO: Frank Furnari
Venture name: VRtuoso
Description of VRtuoso:
VRtuoso is the first scalable extended reality (XR) learning solution for Enterprise. VRtuoso’s live streaming virtual reality (VR) platform has the ability to allow businesses to deliver their training programs from real locations in real-time with real people in 360 degrees. This can be viewed through VR headsets, a PC, laptop, tablet or phone. VRtuoso allows presenters to rapidly create slides with 360° and two-dimensional content, like video, images, text, shapes and polls. VRtuoso can be thought of as the PowerPoint for VR with the capabilities to be much more. VRtuoso’s original value proposition is that VRtuoso is the world’s first turnkey enterprise VR solution over 5G networks for:
- Online VR content creation.
- Real-time guided VR content consumption.
- Live & real-time VR interactive streaming.
Founder Biography:
Frank Furnari is the founder and CEO of VRtuoso. He has had extensive experience in turning ideas into business models and connecting them with the market. His first job after college was working for British Telecom (BT) where he helped develop their first corporate incubator. He worked with different R&D teams and helped them spin-off by writing business models and connecting them with the market. He quickly realized that working full time for someone else wasn’t for him and took an opportunity to join the team of one of the companies that he had helped and together they raised $10M from SoftBank for one of their ventures. Furnari’s first endeavour that he was the founder and leader of was a content delivery network that didn’t last long, but taught him valuable lessons. With the knowledge gained from this failed venture, he set out to start his second company called Clarity International. He was able to apply what he had learned from his previous venture and turned Clarity International into a successful digital design integrator that provides innovative solutions for consulting in learning and developing for major corporations. His involvement with his clients at Clarity is what had led him to create VRtuoso. He identified weaknesses in these companies and saw an opportunity for a new venture to help solve these weaknesses. Frank took action and put together a team and worked in partnership with Microsoft and BT for two years in order to develop what is now VRtuoso. Through the process that led to Frank Furnari becoming the founder and CEO of VRtuoso, Frank had displayed the necessary motivation, aptitude and attitude to be an excellent entrepreneur. Frank Furnari’s perseverance, self-confidence and self-sufficiency in addition to his creativity laid the foundation for him to be a successful entrepreneur. Moreover, his ability to spot opportunities, formulate a solution and take the necessary actions to bring the solution to market are why he has been able to become the founder of two successful ventures. VRtuoso currently has 24 employees and is growing quickly. Frank Furnari has surrounded himself with like minded people who collectively have extensive experience in bringing companies from day one to series A financing. Frank Furnari also mentions that international launch is one of the strengths of his team.
References:
vrtuoso.io
This looks like a really interesting venture and a great way to create more engaging training sessions in a virtual enviornment. I was inspired reading about this founders experience as this was not his first attempt at creating a venture. I think it takes a lot of courage and resilience to try to create another business after failing, but as we can see from his success he was able to learn from his mistakes and past experiences to build VRtuoso. It is a great lesson to remember when you see successful ventures that often entreprenuer have been working for years to create a successful business and that as an entreprenuer you can learn so much from your mistakes.
This looks like a very interesting platform, and Frank Furnari certainly represents the “fail forward” entrepreneur who is really open to learning! I could see numerous applications both in industry and obviously field trips for younger students; I think the next big shift will be finding ways to make even VR guests have the ability to become mobile in their environment. While that may be via some kind of Roomba-like mobile bot or simply sticking the camera in an employees pocket, only time will tell!
I really enjoy anything VR, and I really enjoyed the execution of how Frank created a VR system for more professional purposes. I think that his venture is extremely fitting for him as someone who has been in the said environment and would require a fitting solution to his problems. It seems like that his ability to visualize the future is also a key aspect of his success as VR desperately needs the functionality in order to be more relevant in our recreational and professional lives. I’m wondering what failed in his first endeavor and how he has learned from it.