Virtual Livestreaming Firm MRStage Wins A-Round Financing Worth Around $13.7M From Alibaba

MRStage, a Chinese online virtual activity services provider, has recently completed round-A financing worth around 100 million yuan ($13.7 million) from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, which also became its shareholder on October 26. In August last year, the firm completed pre-A round financing totaling tens of millions of dollars, with Tencent, GGV Capital and other institutions participating.

Before Alibaba becomes its shareholder, MRStage announced in September of this year that it had reached cooperation with DingTalk, an enterprise communication and collaboration platform developed by Alibaba, jointly releasing an online virtual activity solution. At the event where the cooperation was announced, both sides conducted on-site real-time product demonstrations. Hong Xu, CEO of MRStage, was in the simulated office area of the venue, and only with the help of a computer, camera and software of MRStage, he stepped into the 3D virtual DingTalk summit, and interacted with Ye Jun, President of DingTalk.

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In terms of technical capacity, taking a stake in a virtual technology company is also benefitial to DingTalk’s audio and video technology. Functions such as 3D deep real-time virtual systems, real-time light and shadow fusion algorithms, hyper-realistic virtual humans and multi-modal interaction are introduced into audio and video capacity to create a more immersive virtual conference and virtual livestreaming experience for users. Industry insiders believe that Alibaba‘s move to take a stake in MRStage is intended to take the scenario of online virtual activities as a breakthrough point and expand its ecological layout of “Metaverse in Office” for enterprise users.

MRStage was established on November, 2020. In 2021, it started offering 3D real-time virtual solutions to the market in the form of products. After continuous updates, software and hardware products such as MRStage Space, MRStage Space SaaS (software as a service) and MRStage Virtual Production Workstation have been launched, which are widely used in the fields of online activities, annual meeting ceremonies, online investment promotion meetings, online conferences, online education, online livestreaming and content production by enterprise users.

The company has created an easy-to-use 3D editor, so that users can easily complete personalized 3D creation according to their own ideas. On the content level, a rich 3D material library has been created by the company, from 3D scenario templates to 3D props and special effects, which can meet the needs of users in different online activities such as online press conferences, exhibitions, forums and classrooms.