Raising a Seed Round with Against Gravity CEO Nick Fajt

Acquired opens a new miniseries on startup fundraising with Against Gravity, the company behind Rec Room. Nick Fajt describes Rec Room as a VR social club made up of many rooms and experiences, including sports, shooters, adventures, clubs, escape rooms, and comedy venues. The company builds some rooms itself, while increasingly relying on community creators. The hosts position the product as a prominent VR application available across Vive, Oculus, and PlayStation VR, while also noting that its free access is subsidized by venture capital.

The initial financing came from a convertible note sold to friends, family, and former coworkers. It raised almost $1 million, enough to buy equipment, begin development, launch the app, support it for several months, and make key hires. Once Rec Room showed market traction and attracted a passionate user group, Against Gravity raised a larger institutional round to extend its runway until the VR market became substantially larger. Participants included Seattle investors such as Vulcan, Maveron, and Acequia, outside investors including First Round, Betaworks, Anorak, and the VR Fund, and Sequoia, which joined the board.

Fajt attributes the company’s speed to its founders and to a deliberate “ready, fire, aim” process. While he was collecting checks, the team moved from a blank page to a shipped product played by a meaningful portion of the VR audience in 90 days. The approach treats each release as an experiment: ship as soon as the software compiles, collect user feedback, identify what users like or dislike, and address it quickly. Fajt acknowledges that aiming for perfection on the first attempt is difficult, so the team instead optimized for small, frequent improvements.

Rec Room’s community made this feedback loop unusually direct. Players approached the founders in the product, and the company managed active Discord and Reddit communities. When a request could materially improve the experience, the team tried to implement it quickly and tell the requesting users. The founders had met while working on HoloLens at Microsoft, after Fajt had worked on Forza Motorsport. Their HoloLens experience exposed them to early augmented-reality prototypes and helped motivate the move into AR and VR, but Fajt credits his co-founders with much of the specific product direction.

The company deliberately separated its corporate name from its product name. Fajt says that a distinct product identity gives the team more creative license: the product can fail without making the company itself appear to have failed. Rec Room then became the practical starting point for the company’s broader social vision, described as the “Wii Sports of VR.” The interview presents this as a strategic choice rather than proof that the larger vision was guaranteed. The founders were still uncertain whether the long-term opportunity would be AR, VR, or something else, and they were experimenting with the direction of development.