Why we invested in Ready Player Me, cross-platform avatars for the metaverse
The speed at which the metaverse is going mainstream is astounding. Facebook’s decision to re-brand as Meta, in particular, underscores the seismic nature of the shift underway in the marketplace.
Virtual worlds, online gaming, apps, and social media are coalescing into a rapidly evolving metaverse of destinations and experiences – and Ready Player Me is making it easy for users to create avatars on these different platforms.
Over 1,000 companies are already using the SDK that Ready Player Me created for developers, which has resulted in more than 2.5 million avatars generated by end-users. And we believe Ready Player Me is well-positioned to grow as the metaverse evolves. That’s why Samsung Next joined the $13 million Series A round led by Taavet+Sten – the co-founders of Wise and Teleport. Among the other investors are NordicNinja, Konvoy Ventures, Gmoney, and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub.
The primary reason we like Ready Player Me is that it is enabling the development of avatars that can be used on multiple different platforms across the metaverse. The metaverse is not a single app or game. It’s a network of thousands of virtual worlds and experiences that is changing the ways people live, work, and play.
Our investment aligns with the consumer trend around identity and how it will be represented in the metaverse. A person’s online identity may be realistic, and tied to a photograph, or it may be more like a pseudonym, and represented in another manner, like with an avatar. The current explosion in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be attributed to this pseudonymous phenomenon, with owners of NFTs purchasing digital characters to be used as a profile picture on 2D social platforms.
As 3D virtual worlds gain traction, demand will grow for 3D avatars that can be connected to a user’s real or pseudonymous identity. We believe this trend will play an important role in the evolving Web3 ecosystem, which is built on a vision of empowerment, inclusion, and community. The metaverse promises to make a person’s digital identity as important as their physical identity.
Samsung is, of course, going to play a major role in this new paradigm. For example, during CES this year, Samsung announced that its new Smart TVs will include an integrated NFT Platform for discovering, purchasing, and trading digital artwork.
As the metaverse and virtual reality evolve, it doesn’t make sense for consumers to have to build a new avatar to represent their identity each time they enter these worlds. It is also unnecessary for platform developers to build their own solutions for creating avatars. Reinventing the wheel takes a time away from other value-added development efforts.
Ready Player Me has spent the past seven years developing the perfect solution for avatar creation across platforms. The plug-and-play tool gives developers a proven solution for enabling its users to create their own customized avatars, for use across the metaverse.
We also have confidence in Timmu Tõke, founder and CEO of Ready Player Me, and the core technology he developed for Ready Player Me. The company began as a 3D printing and scanning software platform that used ultrasound to generate high fidelity 3D mapping of human features. This technology now enables the ability for users to quickly convert 2D photos into 3D avatars. We think Ready Player Me will capitalize on its installed base of users in the future with a digital asset store that enables artists, brands, and developers to sell customization options for avatars.
Ready Player Me has the right technology at the right time. It has a huge opportunity to grow as users in a multitude of virtual worlds and games customize their own personal avatars. This cross-platform mass market is going to spawn some big success stories and we think Ready Player Me will be one of them.
Brandon Hoffman is an investor at Samsung Next. Samsung Next's investment strategy is limited to its own views and does not reflect the vision or strategy of any other Samsung business unit, including, but not limited, to Samsung Electronics.
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