A significant shareholding in Virtalis (www.virtalis.com) — a leading virtual reality company best known for providing high-quality VR hardware and software to universities such as University of Sheffield and Beuth University in Berlin — has been acquired by funds managed by Alpina Partners.

David Cockburn-Price, managing director of Virtalis, said: “Alpina is an experienced growth investor that will help us to ensure the sustainable development of Virtalis, especially with reference to our direct and indirect sales channels.

“Moreover, Alpina’s investment means we will become part of a larger group of innovative software businesses, which will allow us to exploit synergies on many different levels.”

Dr Florian Strehle, a partner at Alpina said: “We are excited to be supporting the next phase of Virtalis’ worldwide growth strategy.

“Virtalis has launched innovative software like Visionary Render, VR4CAD and GeoVisionary in recent years, to work with its well-known ActiveWorks VR display systems, and this is where we see the growth potential.

“We will work with the Virtalis management team to further develop the company as a leading player in the global enterprise VR software market by leveraging our network and expertise.”