Ready Player Me raises $56 million in Series B funding

Ready Player Me, a cross-game avatar system, has raised over $56 million in its latest funding round. The Avatar-oriented platform confirmed the update in a Tuesday post on its official Twitter handle. According to Ready Player Me, the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz(a16z).

Other notable participants in the funding round include Konvoy Ventures, Collab Currency, Taavet Hinrikus, Sten Tamkivi’s Plural Platform, Comedian Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures, Roblox co-founder David Baszucki, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and Punk6529. Ready Player ME noted that the participants defiled the implications of the prevailing market conditions to aid the firm’s funding investment.

This development comes a few months after the firm completed two different funding rounds. According to reports, it gathered about $16 million from both rounds. Player Me now has aggregate funding of $72 million.

According to Ready Player ME, Jonathan Lai of a16z and Plural’s Tamkivi will be appointed as new members of the Ready Player Me board of directors. The CEO of the cross-game avatar firm, Timmu Toke, confirmed the development, saying the decision was one of the terms of the investment deal.

The CEO hinted that the platform of Ready Player Me is built on Wolf3D’s technology. He added that the creation of the platform manifested two years ago after his team initiated hardware, scanned about 20,000 people with 100 cameras, and obtained a proprietary database of face scans. This, according to him, enabled the team to build the Ready Player Me platform fully.

Additionally, Toke boasted that the Ready Player Me project would serve the needs of direct users and developers. According to him, users can explore the platform to devise avatars without incurring costs. On the other hand, the developers can incorporate the platform into their various applications to secure ready-made avatars without fees.

According to Toke, over 3,000 partners have subscribed to the platform. The partners include Somnium Space, VRChat, Nike NFT studio RTFKT and a host of others. More so, he claims major brands like Adidas collaborate with the firm to enable their subscribers to customize avatars on the platform.

Toke says the firm intends to take the innovation further by availing “content tools” for avatars. With this development, every user can devise accessories for their avatars. He stressed that the firm is “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.”

He added that the firm is waxing stronger every day and is now generating income through selling in-game assets. According to Toke, Ready Player Me intends to expand its workforce despite the layoff trend in the crypto space. Now, the firm has over 50 employees and looks forward to doubling the figure by 2023, the CEO hinted.

Ready Player Me plans to open up the metaverse space fully. Toke noted that the move is necessary because the emerging virtual worlds are “closed ecosystems.” This means users must purchase new assets for every game and virtual platform. As reported, Ready Player Me is designed to be interoperable, which allows for the usage of the same avatar in numerous virtual worlds.

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