With More Than 3000 Partners Already Signed, Ready Player Me to Continue on its Mission to Break Down Walls and Build a More Connected Virtual World
“EBS has played an important role in our lives from the early days,“ Kaspar Tiri, Co-Founder of Ready Player Me says. „Especially Madis Habakuk and Mart Habakuk, who have been mentoring us from the beginning. They have always been there for us during difficult times. “
Kaspar still remembers a day from five years ago when they had shared with the late Madis Habakuk (founder of EBS) that they are running out of money and are feeling hopeless. “Do not disperse your bunch, the chances that you will get the same strong group together again, are very slim, “ Habakuk had explained. „I remember it word by word,“ Kaspar says.
Now, Ready Player Me, a cross-game avatar platform that allows users to explore virtual worlds with one consistent identity, has closed a $56M Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from other notable investors including David Baszucki, co-founder of Roblox, Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch, Sebastian Knutsson & Riccardo Zacconi, King Games co-founders, sports and entertainment company Endeavor, Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures, D’Amelio family, Punk6529, Snowfro, Collab Currency, Plural, Konvoy Ventures and more.
More than 3,000 apps across both Web2 and Web3 already integrate Ready Player Me, including VRChat, Spatial, Somnium Space, RTFKT and many more. The company also already works with individual creators and fashion brands such as Adidas, New Balance, Dior, Pull&Bear, and Warner Brothers (Dune movie outfits) to enable cross-game avatar assets across the metaverse. Ready Player Me provides developers an avatar system, allowing the teams to focus on creating worlds and experiences. The platform also provides distribution through its network, and opens new revenue opportunities through interoperable avatar asset sales and a cross-game economy.
“What will unlock the true metaverse experience is interoperability between games, worlds and applications and a consistent identity for users across all experiences,” said Timmu Tõke, co-founder and CEO, Ready Player Me. “We think it's essential for virtual worlds users to create an avatar they love and buy avatar skins and accessories that work across the metaverse and are not stuck in one game. This infusion of funds will allow Ready Player Me to continue scaling the avatar system to make it more flexible for developers, create new tools to help developers monetize with avatar assets, and build tools for individual creators to take part of the cross-game avatar marketplace.”
Ready Player Me is driven by the belief that an open Metaverse with millions of interlinked experiences, rather than a few large walled gardens, will drive better user experience, creator experience and economics. An interoperable user ID and avatar sits at the center of the open metaverse to be a cohesive experience. And an open marketplace of avatar assets will increase the size of the market and allow developers in the metaverse to increase their revenues.
“Ready Player Me is loved by both developers and players as the largest platform for avatar-systems-as-a-service, and is well on their way to building the interoperable identity protocol for the open Metaverse,” said Jonathan Lai, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We’ve been deeply impressed by the team’s blend of developer empathy, technical chops, and entrepreneurial pragmatism, and couldn't be more excited to partner with them on this journey.”
The Ready Player Me avatar system is the cumulative product of over eight years of research and development. Early on, the company built custom avatar systems and technology for enterprise customers like Tencent, Verizon, HTC, Wargaming, and more. Over the years, Ready Player Me aggregated a proprietary database of 20,000+ face scans captured with the company’s own hardware-based 3D scanners. These scans enabled Ready Player Me to build a deep-learning solution that can accurately predict and render realistic faces from a single 2D photo. This system runs across desktop, web, and mobile, and is available to developers through a robust SDK and API.
For more information on Ready Player Me, please visit https://readyplayer.me
