“Our product vision is about creating the flight simulator for blank: insert job here,” says Derek Belch, Strivr’s founder and CEO.

Virtual reality is not yet widely used by anyone: the best hardware is too clunky and expensive for most of us to want to use more than occasionally, and there isn’t a ton of stuff to do with it, either. Some companies are starting to experiment with it, but it is not yet clear how it might help the bottom line. For now, the technology is more popular with consumers, though that’s still a tiny market.

It makes sense that sports are a big part of Strivr’s customer base. As a graduate student and football coach at Stanford in 2014, Belch started Strivr to help train players, who can only be on the field for a certain amount of time. He figured that watching filmed plays on a VR headset could be a more immersive (and realistic) way to train than just watching videos, shot from the angles viewers typically see, on a flat screen.

So Belch began experimenting, filming football practices once a week with a 360° rig of GoPro cameras set up to show blitzes from the quarterback’s point of view. The results, he said, were really good. So good, in fact, that as he finished his master’s program at Stanford, he decided to turn his project into a company. Stanford’s head football coach, David Shaw, invested in it and is now listed as an advisor to the startup.

These days Strivr, which sits midway between Facebook’s headquarters and Belch’s alma mater on a busy corner in Menlo Park, has branched out far beyond football. In addition to Walmart and various NFL and other sports teams, it’s working with United Rentals, two car makers, and numerous other customers. Stanford still uses it, too, Belch says, filming about 80 plays per week.