Quick take:
- Ready Player Me has announced the completion of a $56 million funding round.
- The Series B fundraising was led by leading Web3 investment firm a16z.
- The metaverse avatar platform will partly use the funds to expand its development team according to CEO Timmu Toke.
Ready Player Me has secured $56 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The Series A fundraising also attracted participation from Konvoy Ventures, Collab Currency, Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi’s Plural Platform and comedian Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures.
David Baszucki, Roblox and Justin Kan, Twitch, as well as, popular NFT collector pseudonym Punk6529 were also among leading individual investors.
The metaverse avatar platform plans to use the funds to double the size of its team, which currently stands at 50, Ready Player Me CEO, Timmu Tõke told The Block.
The fundraising also comes at the back of Ready Player Me’s $13 million Series A round led by Taavet+Sten in December last year. The company had raised a total of $29.5 million in seven rounds before today, including pre-seed, seed, a venture round and a Series A, according to CrunchBase.
Ready Player Me is a metaverse avatar creation platform inspired by the popular novels by Ernest Cline, which resulted in the creation of a gaming series and the 2018 film “Ready Player One”.
Ready Player Me will allow metaverse game developers to bring the imaginative gaming experience of Ready Player One to Web3. To do that effectively, the company will be tapping on to the leadership and experience of a16z’s Jonathan Lai and Plural’s Tamkivi, who have joined the metaverse avatar platform’s board.
Toke’s experience in developing 3D avatars dates back to 2014, when his company Wolf3D worked with leading technology and entertainment companies like Tencent, Verizon and HTC, building custom avatar systems.
According to toke, Ready Player Me is built on a strong foundation of a proprietary database of face scans. He said Wolf3D scanned over 20,000 people with over 100 cameras, allowing him to launch the metaverse avatar platform in 2020.
The platform allows users to create avatars for free, which can then be fetched by developers for use in various metaverse projects, at no cost.
Leading web3 projects like VRChat, Somnium Space and NFT studio RTFKT— acquired by Nike in December last year, have already integrated Ready Player Me, according to the CEO.
The company has also teamed up with leading sportswear brand Adidas while Spatial integrated ready Player Me in May to bring inclusivity to the metaverse.
The company is now focusing on developing a tool kit that will make it easier for anyone to create avatars. “We’re building tools to scale our platform so that any individual artist or creator can take part, create assets and sell them on the open marketplace,” Toke said.
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