EXCLUSIVE: Freiburg’s VUSE XR raises €1.2 million to bring AI-powered mixed reality training to enterprises

VUSE XR, a Freiburg-based startup developing enterprise software for mixed reality training, today announced the closing of a €1.2 million pre-Seed financing round.

The round was led by IACD, a Düsseldorf-based business angel network, with additional participation from individual business angels.

“From an investor’s perspective, VUSE XR brings together everything we look for at this stage: an exceptional team, defensible AI-driven technology, and strong commercial traction. The company has demonstrated its ability to turn a technically demanding product into a scalable software business with considerable growth potential, further accelerated by continuous AI-powered feature enrichment,” said Markus Roithmeier, IACD member and Chairman of the VUSE XR Advisory Board.

Founded in November 2023 by cousins Niclas Matthias and Dr. Paul Matthias, VUSE XR develops the VUSE XR Hub, an enterprise software platform that enables industrial and life sciences companies to create, manage and deploy immersive mixed reality training for complex products and processes.

While mixed reality hardware has matured rapidly, producing the training content to run on it has remained expensive and difficult to scale; VUSE XR is addressing this problem. The startup replaces the traditional model of costly, agency-led custom mixed reality projects with a standardised, AI-assisted workflow that allows companies to build, update and distribute training content themselves, across products and locations.

The biggest selling point here is the ease with which VUSE XR helps enterprises to create mixed reality training content. The VUSE XR Hub works by converting existing CAD models, engineering data and product documentation into photorealistic 3D models, which users can then arrange into interactive training sequences using AI-assisted tools or drag-and-drop functionality.

“Mixed reality hardware is advancing rapidly, but creating mixed reality training content remains the biggest barrier to broader enterprise adoption. The VUSE XR Hub removes this bottleneck, enabling companies to unlock significant business value from mixed reality,” said Niclas Matthias, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of VUSE XR.

Once the content is created, training can be delivered via a web browser, mobile devices, or fully immersive XR headsets such as Meta Quest. The results are tracked centrally, and content can be updated and redeployed across an organisation at any time.

The company already counts some of the major names in the industrial and life sciences space as its customers. Its customer base includes ZEISS, Hologic, Badenova, Scheidt & Bachmann, WITRON, University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and Sartorius. VUSE XR has won the smartXautomation Award 2025, the AI Champions Award 2025 from the German state of Baden-Württemberg, and the pitch competition at Black Forest Space 2026.

Andreas Goss, IACD member and former Chief Executive Officer of thyssenkrupp Steel, said, “Effective training is critical to productivity, knowledge transfer and the safe operation of increasingly complex products and processes. The technology developed by VUSE XR has the potential to fundamentally change how companies deliver training, making it more accessible and scalable across products and locations.”

Alongside the funding, VUSE XR is strengthening its commercial leadership team with two senior appointments: Jan Hendrik Degner, who joins as Chief Commercial Officer, bringing experience from J.P. Morgan and CEWE Group, and Robert Günther, whose background includes senior positions at Meta and Unity, takes the role of Vice President of Sales and Service Delivery.

The startup says it will use the pre-Seed capital to advance its enterprise mixed reality training platform VUSE XR Hub, expand its AI-assisted creation capabilities and accelerate commercial growth. “With this funding and our expanded commercial team, we are ready to build VUSE XR into the category leader in enterprise mixed reality training,” Matthias added.

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