That work led to the company aggregating a proprietary database of more than 20,000 face scans, created using the company’s own 3D scanners. In support of the latter route, Ready Player Me says that its tech was eight years in the making: the company was hatched out of Wolf3D, which worked with companies like Tencent, Verizon, HTC and Wargaming to build them custom avatar systems. Or, potentially, an opportunity: It makes a company like Ready Player Me an acquisition target for those hoping to be the single most powerful platform extending across the metaverse but it also gives the startup some potential strategic impetus to grow and become that platform itself. That is definitely one potential gating factor for startups like this one. Whether that concept will have staying power over time - for example 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 - remains to be seen. That number says something about the fragmentation in the space at the moment - and something about how long-tail the audience is right now, too - two reasons why having companies building services that work across all of these different walled gardens makes some sense. The more than 3,000 partners that it works with is more than triple the number it had in January (when the number was around 900). Ready Player Me isn’t disclosing a valuation - Toke said “it’s good” - but the round is coming swiftly on the heels of the company’s last round, a Series A of $13 million earlier this year in January in a round led by Taavet + Sten (a VC led by Taavet Hinrikus formerly of Wise/TransferWise and Sten Tamkivi, formerly of Teleport and once an EIR at a16z it’s also in this Series B).īetween then and now, Ready Player Me has been growing like a weed. David Baszucki, co-founder of Roblox Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, King Games co-founders sports and entertainment company Endeavor Kevin Hart and Hartbeat Ventures the TikTok-y D’Amelio family Punk6529 Snowfro Collab Currency Plural Konvoy Ventures Robin Chan, co-founder of Fractal and others are also participating.
The Series B is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, the storied VC that has in recent times doubled down on all things web3, including metaverse technology and it is being joined by a longer list of equally big names. We’re trying to push the world towards that metaverse.” “There may be metaverse owned by big companies, who will make all the rules, but there is a vision of an open one where people can travel, built by millions of developers, where no one controls the whole thing. “Our bigger vision is to connect the metaverse through avatars,” said Timmu Toke, co-founder and CEO, Ready Player Me, in an interview. The company today handles about 5 million avatars from across some 3,000 partners, and the funding will be used in three basic areas: to continue hiring (the company has offices in NYC) to expand the platform with more developer tools, including those for monetization and to build more services for creators using Ready Player Me (it offers both an SDK and API) and to double down on the idea that creating single avatars, and identities, that are interoperable and can be used across multiple virtual environments will improve overall user experience, and thus help grow user numbers. Now, in a spot of perfect timing, a startup out of Tallinn, Estonia, called Ready Player Me - which has built a popular platform for creating dynamic, animated avatars to use across virtual worlds built and operated by others - is announcing $56 million in funding to grow its business. His quick response promising better avatars for the actual launch speaks to just how much appearances do matter in these situations. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg was roundly mocked for the bad graphics in his preview of a new expansion of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s metaverse effort.
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