Ready Player Me Announces $56M Series B Led by Andreessen Horowitz
- Ready Player Me anticipates using the funds on hiring more developers among other professionals.
- Unveiled eight years ago, the company started by building 3D scanning hardware.
- Later, the company moved on to building custom avatar systems for companies like Tencent, Huawei, HTC, Wargaming, and Verizon.
Ready Player Me, a metaverse multichain enabler, has announced the completion of its Series B funding round with $56 million led by Andreessen Horowitz. Notably, a16z GAMES FUND ONE and a16z crypto were on the front line, with participation from Plural, David Baszucki, co-founder of Roblox, Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and Fractal, Robin Chan, co-founder of Fractal, Henry Ault, co-founder of Eco, Sebastian Knutsson & Riccardo Zacconi, King Games co-founders, Collab Currency, Endeavor, Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures, D’Amelio family, Punk6529, Snowfro, Nordic Ninja, Konvoy among others.
According to the formal announcement, Ready Player Me anticipates using the funds on hiring more developers among other professionals.
“The funding will help us scale up the team from 51 people today and will give us financial stability for the unpredictable markets ahead. Many developers are relying on us with a key feature of their product,” the company noted.
Ready Player Me and the Metaverse Industry
Unveiled eight years ago, Ready Player Me
started by building 3D scanning hardware. Later, the company moved on to building custom avatar systems for companies like Tencent, Huawei, HTC, Wargaming, and Verizon. In May 2020, the company launched Ready Player Me and has rapidly scaled it to over 3,000 customers across the metaverse.
A lot of companies have developed metaverse technology based on further speculation. However, most of these Metaverses remain disconnected from each other, thus throttling their future growth prospects. Moreover, the future of blockchain technology has been argued to be heavily dependent on the success of multi chains.
The company is focused on developing avatars that are interoperable with different metaverses.
“For the open metaverse to emerge, cross-world services and standards that enable virtual worlds to be connected and interoperable must be built. Avatars and identities play a huge role in that. It’s essential for anyone to be able to create an avatar they love and take it to any virtual world they want,” the company further said.
With the cash at hand, the company has pledged to improve avatar diversity with body types, granular clothing customization, more accurate face shape prediction, and stylization.
Additionally, the company said the cash will help build avatar content creation tools to enable developers, brands, and individual artists to create and sell avatar customization assets that work across thousands of virtual worlds.
The company is not only enabling its avatars to thrive but also others from different metaverses to move seamlessly.
The metaverse is expected to change different sectors including the gaming industry, media, entertainment, architecture, and engineering among others in the next decade.
According to a Bloomberg report, the global Metaverse revenue opportunity could approach $800 billion in 2024. Remember, major institutional investors like Meta (formerly Facebook) have shifted focus on the metaverse industry.
Rebecca is a Senior Staff Writer at BitcoinWisdom, working hard to bring you the latest breaking news in the cryptocurrency market. In the words of Elon Musk “Buy stock in several companies that make products & services that *you* believe in. Only sell if you think their products & services are trending worse. Don’t panic when the market does. This will serve you well in the long-term.”
