Ready Player Me Raised $56 Million
Ready Player Me raised $56 million in a Series B funding round led by a16z GAMES FUND ONE and a16z crypto, 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, etc.
The metaverse is not a single app. It’s a network of millions of virtual worlds people visit to play games, socialize and collaborate. Today, most of those worlds are closed and disconnected walled gardens.
Ready Player Me believes in the future of an open and connected metaverse that is built by many developers and creators and is not controlled by one company.
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.
Ready Player Me exists to break down walls to build a more connected virtual world. They are the avatar interoperability layer for the metaverse.
For developers
The actual builders of the metaverse are the game and virtual world developers working hard to create fun and engaging (perhaps even life-changing?) experiences for all of us to participate in.
It’s incredibly difficult to build a game or a virtual world. The platform aims to make it slightly less painful for developers by removing an important and complex part they have to spend their time on — building an avatar creator. It makes no sense for each game to build its own closed avatar creators.
Ready Player Me spent eight years building avatar tech, so they don’t have to. Their tools give developers a world-class avatar creator they can integrate in days. This leaves more capacity for the core experience of their games and will result in a better overall experience.
With the new funding Ready Player Me will utilize the following:
- Scale the Ready Player Me avatar creator to make it more flexible and performant for the many types of developers we work with.
- 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.
- Improve avatar diversity with body types, granular clothing customization, more accurate face shape prediction, stylization, and more.
- Include other avatars on Ready Player Me. We’re not aiming to be the only avatar in the metaverse. The goal is to help avatars to travel across virtual worlds.
ABOUT Ready Player Me
Ready Player Me is a cross-game avatar platform. Integrate Ready Player Me avatars into your app or game in less than a day. Supports Web, Unity, Unreal, React Native, Android, and iOS native.
