The draw of virtual reality social spaces is that a person can be whisked away from any space, such as a living room or office, and become immersed in a computer-generated world. Seeking to expand such social virtual worlds, UK-based VR startup vTime Holdings Ltd. announced Wednesday the company has raised $7.6 million in a Series A funding round.

VTime launched its social VR app in 2015 and now has a widely available VR social network with almost a million downloads across six platforms. Using vTime, up to four people can join a social virtual space and interact with one another as avatars, or 3-D graphical personas customized by the individuals behind them.

Although the users cannot walk around, arms and faces can gesture and change expression to help build an immersive social experience as participants speak to one another. According to vTime Cheif Executive Officer Martin Kenwright, the app “offers users the most immersive and intuitive way to engage with others in VR from wherever they are” and provides the tools to bring people together even if they are far apart in strange and interesting places.

Environments can include sitting on rocks in the middle of a slow-moving river, around a campfire at night, on an arctic ice floe, at a table in a downtown boardroom, on cushions in a Victorian train car, deep under the waves with seaweed and whales amid many other locations. Kenwright added that the company continues to grow the number of virtual environments for people to gather inside.

The VR software is available for Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality, Google Cardboard and Google Daydream. It’s also available as free Android and iOS apps for mobile devices.

This round of investment was led by Deepbridge Capital and also included funds from Liverpool-based loan and equity provider MSIF. Kenwright said vTime will use the funding to expand the reach of the app by accelerating global growth and marketing to reach out to more VR users.

The money also will go toward research and development into augmented reality, where computer graphic imagery is overlaid onto the visible world. According to Kenwright, vTime plans to release an AR experience later this year.

“The advent of consumer augmented reality at scale is allowing us to use decades of expertise to develop another unique way to connect and engage with friends and family in alternate realities,” said Kenwright.

The VR industry has started out somewhat small since 2014, hampered somewhat by expensive equipment and slow content generation. According to a report from Statistica, the estimated number of VR users in 2018 will reach 171 million and is set to grow at an extraordinary rate with the release of cheaper headsets this year.

Last year, Microsoft Corp. saved the social VR app by AltspaceVR Inc. and reopened the app. With AltspaceVR, users could bring simplistic avatars into 3-D spaces and interact with sound and graphics both socially or collaboratively. In September, a similar VR social app, VRChat, raised $4 million in its own Series A round led by VR headset maker HTC Corp.

Other notable VR social efforts include Sansar, the potential successor of long-running 3-D social space Second Life by Linden Labs, and Against Gravity, a whimsical social VR world created by Rec Room that raised $5 million in funding last year.

Also worth mentioning, Facebook Inc., which acquired the maker of the Oculus Rift in 2014 for $3 billion, has also released an extremely popular VR social app called Spaces.

Image: vTime