The Freiburg start-up turns CAD files and product documentation into mixed reality training, and counts ZEISS, Sartorius and Hologic among its customers.

Image: VUSE XR press image, via EU-Startups.

VUSE XR, a Freiburg-based company that builds software for creating mixed reality training, has closed a €1.2 million pre-seed round led by IACD, a business angel network based in Düsseldorf. Individual business angels also took part.

Alongside the funding, the company has hired two senior commercial executives. Jan Hendrik Degner joins as chief commercial officer, bringing experience from J.P. Morgan and photo company CEWE Group, while Robert Günther, who previously held senior roles at Meta and Unity, becomes vice president of sales and service delivery.

From CAD model to headset

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

Mixed reality training has traditionally been built as custom projects, often by agencies, with each experience developed separately. That makes content expensive to produce and hard to update when products change. VUSE XR's approach is to standardise the workflow. The Hub converts existing CAD models, engineering data and product documentation into photorealistic 3D models, which users then arrange into interactive training sequences using AI-assisted tools, text prompts or drag-and-drop editing.

Finished training can be delivered through a web browser, on mobile devices or on headsets such as Meta Quest. Results are tracked centrally, and content can be updated and redeployed across an organisation, according to EU-Startups.

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

Early enterprise traction

The company says its customers include ZEISS, Hologic, Badenova, Scheidt & Bachmann, WITRON, Sartorius and the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), across sectors including medical and laboratory technology, energy and mobility. It sells the platform through recurring software licences and helps customers build their first training applications. VUSE XR won the smartXautomation Award 2025, Baden-Württemberg's AI Champions Award 2025 and the pitch competition at Black Forest Space 2026.

Markus Roithmeier, an IACD member who chairs VUSE XR's advisory board, said the company "brings together everything we look for at this stage: an exceptional team, defensible AI-driven technology, and strong commercial traction."

Andreas Goss, an IACD member and former chief executive of thyssenkrupp Steel, said effective training is "critical to productivity, knowledge transfer and the safe operation of increasingly complex products and processes," adding that the technology "has the potential to fundamentally change how companies deliver training."

The money will go towards developing the VUSE XR Hub, expanding its AI-assisted content creation and accelerating 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 said.

Why it matters

Europe's manufacturers and medtech firms face a growing skills gap as products become more complex and experienced staff retire. Headsets have become cheaper and better, but the content problem has kept enterprise mixed reality stuck in pilot projects. If VUSE XR can make training as easy to update as a document, it gives German industry a practical use for XR, and a homegrown supplier for it.

Sources

• VUSE XR funding announcement, Freiburg, 29 October 2026, as reported by EU-Startups
• Tech.eu, 29 October 2026
• Startup.eu and Dealroom News, 29 October 2026