Mark was mocked for the bad graphics in his preview of the new expansion of the game. His quick reply that he would make a betteravatar for the launch speaks to how important appearances are in these situations. A startup out of Talinn, Estonia called Ready Player Me, which has built a popular platform for creating dynamic, animated avatar to use across virtual worlds built and operated by others, is announcing $56 million in funding to grow its business.
The funding will be used to hire more people, expand the platform with more developer tools, and build more services for creators using Ready.
In an interview, Timmu Toke, co-founder and CEO of Ready Player Me, said that they want to connect the metaverse throughavatars. There is a vision of an open experience where people can travel, built by millions of developers, where no one controls the whole thing. I like the internet. We want the world to go towards the metaverse.
A longer list of equally big names is joining the Series B, led by the storied VC that has doubled down on all things web3 and metaverse technology. David Baszucki, co-founder of Roblox; Justin Kan, co-founder of twitch; Sebastian Knutsson, King Games co-founder; Kevin Hart and Hartbeat Venture; and the TikTok-y D'Amelio.
Ready Player Me isn't revealing a valuation, but the round is coming quickly on the heels of the company's last round, a Series A of $13 million.
Ready Player Me has become a weed since then. The number of partners that it works with has more than tripled since January.
Two reasons why having companies building services that work across all of these different walled gardens makes sense are the fact that the space is fragmented and that long-tail audience is also present.
If we start to see some consolidation and concentration of audiences, or if bigger players like Meta want to take the creation and control of avatars into their own hands, it's not certain whether that concept will have staying power over time. It's definitely one of the potential gating factors for this startup. It makes a company like Ready Player Me an acquisition target for those hoping to be the single more powerful platform that extends across the metaverse.
In support of the latter route, Ready Player Me says that its tech was eight years in the making.
The company created a database of more than 20,000 face scans using its own 3D scanning technology. Ready Player Me uses a database that was used to build a platform that can produce real-time animated avatars not like the ones you get on Apple's iOS, except that with Ready Player Me, the animated avatars are created to "Accurately predict and render realistic." 3D images can also be worked on.
The site has not been updated since Ready Player Me was released. It has kept it up, but the enterprise/B2B business has been rolled up for now.
Ready Player Me has partners in both web3 and web2 environments. Adidas, New Balance, Dior, Pull&Bear, and Warner Brothers are some of the fashion brands that the startup works with. The partners are the ones building platforms, games and other experiences within those other platforms, and so part of what Ready Player Me also offers is a chance for its network of partners to integrate their avatar into those other experiences.
The midsized gaming company is our main target. Toke said that it makes sense to work with Meta and others first. A big part of the network is still not activated and there is a lot more growth to come.
A lot of proponents of web3 think the whole effort will become more viable in the long term because of the idea of building a platform to createavatars that work across multiple environments. Some of the big issues in metaverse business models up to now have been accessibility and user experience, in effect, you have to buy into device ownership and it's all a little clumsy to use
"Ready Player Me is loved by both developers and players as the largest platform for avatars-systems-as-a-service, and is well on their way to building the interoperable identity protocol for the open Metaverse," said Jonathan Lai, a general partner at the company. The team has a blend of developer empathy, technical chops, and entrepreneurial pragmatism and we couldn't be more excited to work with them.
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