Redcliffe Capital's Dheeraj Jain backs San Francisco VR startup Xanadu Heights

Virtual reality game studio Xanadu Heights Inc. has secured seed investment from Dheeraj Jain, managing partner at London-based investment firm Redcliffe Capital.

The round was closed in October and the company will use the funds for production and to launch the game this winter, the company said in a statement. Designed specifically for virtual reality, the game will be available only on HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR headsets.

"Xanadu Heights is a game that tackles a tough niche in VR: racing. High-speed motion in virtual reality is a particularly challenging scenario to build around. Our team has been developing this game since late 2015, and we are eager to share our progress publicly very soon," Preetam Mukherjee, founder and principal producer of the game franchise, said in the press note.

Xanadu's game will be a three-part series, the first of which will be released this winter. The games will be available as paid downloadable content on Steam Early Access and the HTC Viveport later this year. The initial price for the first chapter is estimated to be $19.99.

Xanadu Heights is based out of San Francisco, California and is part of the Upload VR Collective, a co-working and incubation space dedicated to virtual reality firms.

In September this year, Jain told Techcircle that his investment firm will launch a $50 million early-stage fund – Redcliffe Capital Early Stage Fund 1 – to invest in technology startups in India, Singapore, London, San Francisco, and Helsinki. The fund will make Series A investments in firms focused on artificial intelligence, Internet of things (IoT), virtual reality, big data analytics, healthcare and biotechnology.

In the same month, Jain led an angel investment round worth $150,000 (Rs 1 crore) along with Palash Jain, former head of Google India's core operations, in employee engagement platform inFeedo.

In August, Jain along with ah! Ventures, People Group's Anupam Mittal and others backed Delhi-based online wedding planner Shaadisaga.

Besides angel investing, Jain is also the co-founder of Deyor Camps, a startup that allows users to book camping trips, along with Chirag Gupta, Aakaar Gandhi, and Gautam Yadav. The firm last month secured $500,000 (Rs 3.34 crore) in funding from early-stage investment firm Udaan Angel Partners and angel investors such as Nitin Passi, Manickam Mahalingam, Rajesh Arora, and Arkas Industries.

Jain told Techcircle that he intends to invest in three more startups and make two partial exits by year-end, before launching the new fund.