Bucking the trend - from Commercial Gaming Success to Defense

This will be an interesting session providing great insight from a commercially successful company migrating a product from the consumer and enterprise space into Defense. Many companies start the opposite, transitioning from grant or SBIR federal funding out into the commercial sector About Jan Goetgeluk Jan Goetgeluk is the founder and CEO of Virtuix and the inventor of the Omni, the world’s first omni-directional treadmill that lets users walk and run in 360 degrees inside videogames and other virtualreality worlds. To date, Virtuix has shipped over $20 million worth of products, primarily to commercial entertainment customers including Dave & Buster’s, and they’ve built a fast-growing community of over 400,000 registered players. In 2025, Virtuix unveiled Omni Mission Trainer (OMT), a mixed-reality training system that lets 12+ soldiers move around freely and without boundaries inside a virtual training environment while seeing and using their actual weapons and equipment. Virtuix has raised more than $40MM from private and institutional investors, including Mark Cuban, twelve venture capital funds, and two strategic investors. Prior to founding Virtuix, Jan was an Investment Banking Associate with JP Morgan in Houston and New York. He holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ghent in Belgium, and an MBA from Rice University in Houston, Texas.