Industry leaders Felix & Paul Studios and VRSE have secured multi-million Series A funding this week. From the LA Times yesterday:

Vrse, the VR firm launched by video and commercial director Chris Milk and Google veteran Aaron Koblin, has received $12.56 million in financing from a group of investors that includes WME and Fox, the company announced Thursday. As part of its next phase, executives said, they will also rename Vrse as Within.

Film backers Annapurna and Legendary Pictures as well as Vice, Tribeca Enterprises, Andreessen Horowitz, Raine Ventures and Elisabeth Murdoch’s Freelands Ventures are also among those kicking in money. As with WME, all those firms had participated in an earlier round of seed funding.

Also from the LA Times, today:

Felix & Paul Studios, the upstart Montreal company that is establishing itself as a major virtual-reality player, has raised $6.8 million, a large portion of it from Comcast Corp.

The Quebec-based firm announced the funding Wednesday, saying that in exchange for its lead investment, the Universal Pictures parent would receive a board seat and work closely with the VR company. Homegrown entity Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, the China-based LDV Partners and current financier Phi Group also are part of the financing round.

…

Founded by the digital filmmakers Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael, Felix & Paul was among the first entities to jump into the VR game, creating an in-studio piece with the musician Patrick Watson several years ago. To the film community, Felix & Paul is best known for its work on adjunct VR pieces to the Reese Witherspoon drama “Wild” and the 2015 summer blockbuster “Jurassic World.”

Still from “Nomads: Herders” by Felix & Paul Studios

We’ve featured both Milk and Koblin on numerous occasions on this site, most recently for this interactive music video. They are famed creators who have pushed the fusion of art and technology further than just about anyone, and Evolution of Verse, the debut short film from Within (VRSE), is a landmark of the nascent medium. While at Sundance 2015, and readily experienced through Google Cardboard, the work was a gateway for innumerable conversions to the gospel of VR, becoming the first 360 video experience many experienced.

Felix & Paul were also at Sundance 2015 with several works, including their fabulous “Nomad” series, a stunning anthropological travel series of experiences. We featured the duo for their VFX short film, Tungijuq in 2009, but sadly that film is no longer online.

While on the surface this seems like minor news — the VR market is frothy with investment — heretofore the majority of that money was being allocated towards hardware and technology. Even as film festivals have raced to create VR specific side-bars in anticipation for the new forms of storytelling that would emerge, these are the first significant venture rounds for non-game, content-specific, companies.

Within and Felix & Paul Studios are the clear leaders in the space, so that they received this investment is not a surprise, but it is gratifying to see the success of two companies that are creator-lead. The radical newness of the medium has put upstarts and legacy media companies on an equal footing, resetting entrenched hierarchies. Because of the open field nature of the space, there will be increased opportunities for creatives themselves to own the means of production and grow new media companies into powerhouses. VR entertainment is a work-in-progress, and is in the process of being invented by creative artists—especially artists with a track record in the short form, so as VR entertainment moves on its path towards ubiquity, it is welcome to see short form artists be some of the primary beneficiaries.