How AxonVR's fundraising video hit YouTube's home page

Before HaptX was the VR glove and robotics company, it was called “AxonVR” and we had a vision to build fully-immersive, full-body VR. I co-created and edited a company vision video as a fundraising tool.

It was unlisted on Vimeo, until someone called VRGamingFan published it to YouTube. The video racked up more than a million views and trended on YouTube’s front page.

This led to coverage from Road to VR and was the top post on r/oculus, which was at the time the most active VR reddit forum. The reddit comments were full of negativity and skepticism. My post addressing the criticism head-on became the top upvoted comment and changed the tone of the Reddit thread. It was even quoted in an update to Road to VR’s story.

We considered issuing a takedown of the VRGamingFan copy of our video, since the account was not the rights holder. However, we saw a high volume of interest from this and it would be a shame to lose out on it. Instead we commented on the video to direct viewers to our website.

Reposts of the video earned millions of views. People were excited about this audacious vision for the future of VR. It gave our pre-product startup momentum for our fundraising round.

The Verge, IEEE, and GeekWire: Building AxonVR PR momentum

GeekWire covered our fundraise, key leadership hires, and patents. They even named us one of the 10 hottest startups in Seattle.

I shared our demo with The Verge and IEEE Spectrum and earned glowing reviews and positive stories from each of them. Evan Ackerman described the experience as “absolutely magical.”

We had great momentum with AxonVR, but the brand was short-lived. We changed our name to HaptX in 2017. That’s a story for another blog post.