Image courtesy Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me Raises $56M to Expand Cross-game Avatar Platform

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Aug 23, 2022

Ready Player Me, a company focused on bringing cross-platform avatars to VR and beyond, announced it’s closed a $56 million Series B round.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from investors including Roblox co-founder David Baszucki, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, King Games co-founders Sebastian Knutsson & Riccardo Zacconi, sports and entertainment company Endeavor, Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures, D’Amelio family, Punk6529, Snowfro, Collab Currency, Plural, and Konvoy Ventures.

Ready Player Me co-founder and CEO Timmu Tõke says the funds will allow the company to continue scaling its 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.”

Founded in 2014 in Tallinn, Estonia, Ready Player Me now counts over 3,000 apps across both Web2 and Web3 that integrate its cross-platform avatar system, including VR social platforms such as VRChat, Spatial, vSpatial and Somnium Space.

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While the company’s main focus is on offering developers a ready-made avatar system that allows users to have a persistent online identity, part of the company’s monetization strategy is centered on bringing fashion brands into the fold so users can purchase digital accessories, including brands such as Adidas, New Balance, Dior, Pull&Bear, and Dune film outfits courtesy Warner Brothers.

Ready Player Me also puts heavy emphasis on its ability to generate avatars based on a single user photo, something that runs across desktop, web, and mobile. The company says this was accomplished by compiling a database of 20,000+ face scans captured using 3D scanners and a training a deep learning system that was eventually able to predict and render realistic faces from a single 2D photo.

According to data obtained by CrunchBase, the company’s Series B represents its largest single investment yet, bringing Ready Player Me’s overall outside funding to $85.5 million following a $13 million Series A raised in December 2021.

ViRGiN

I’ve seen them being used in some pool game on AppLab… they do not look as ‘cool’ as they do here.
VirtualRealityNation

Safest Bet in the Metaverse. I’ve been saying it for over a year.
- ViRGiN
  
  imagine putting faith into company receiving 56 millions in investors money for only a ‘small part’ of metaverse, when the actual metaverse will be worth trillions of dollars.
  this is for the indie games. they did not achieve ANYTHING new. it’s just easier implementation for vr devs. samsung took your photo and transformed you into their own stylized emoji years ago.
  
  it’s essentially hurting the actual developers – unless you’re making something extremely simple like game of chess, pool, ping pong etc – everyone else will make fun of you of ‘asset flipping’ the most important characters. and no matter the randomization, they all look “virtually” the same. great placeholders, but the metaverse that makes sense, will use actual photorealistic avatars.
  
  vrchat and neos has proven how they are not able to move forward, despite gathering majority of ‘advanced’ vr crowd.
  - VirtualRealityNation
    
    I think you are forgetting one huge thing. Fashion brands. Where does Tommy Hillfigger go if the company wants their clothes and IP into the metaverse? Where does Christian DIor, The GAP, Gucci, Prada, Fendi, Canada Goose go? Which avatar platform is supported by over 1500 apps and metaverse type worlds? RPM is the only one. The Fashion industry is a 3 trillion dollar a year industry. Trust me 1000% these brands are pretty confident who the winner of this race for the next few years will be. I know because I have been talking with some of these brands about this very issue.
    RPM is a very safe and smart bet for them. Clothing in the Metaverse will eventually be massive in terms of $$$. RPM stands to be at or near the center of all of that.
    
    It’s easy for the novice metaverse user which will eventually number in the 100s of Millions if not Billions. Plus, they will most likely use some or most of that 56M for avatar improvements to allow for more customizations and nuanced avatar features. While I agree the characters have a similar look, were just at the begining of where this all goes. Some people may prefer photorealisitc avatars but many others wont. Look at the anime characters of VR Chat. Everytime I am at a party with a bunch of RPM characters I see a teddy bear, dragon, or a robot. People also want variety and options of attire to express themselves in ways that look different then their actual physical appearance. I feel strongly that RPM is in a very good position.
    
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    - ViRGiN
      
      I would start with saying that no real, touchable products that resemble anything close to real metaverse actually exist today that are available to consumers or prosumers. What we have at best are piss poor concept art multiplayer art ‘minigames’. They are investing in the wrong horse currently.
      
      They are an avatar platform. They need to have a real fun product first in order for people to start spending money on it if it stops being free. And we are talking about super successfull scope of projects – those big companies expect big success – like call of duty mobile. they have a desired fun product with millions of users, very accessible. they do make seasonal partnerships with others, and sell in game items, cosmetics etc. result? mobile alone was responsible for about 60% of revenue from all cod titles 2022, the rest was combined from pc and consoles.
      
      vrchat is also not becoming the metaverse. i do not see how they monetize themselves, and still, that’s a limited market, and not something that will ever go mainstream. for your average user, vrchat is nothing but cringe full of weebs and furries, a complete turn off full of stereotypes proving themselves true, and don’t even get me started about having to get into it more etc.
    - ViRGiN
      
      i don’t really care about gucci or prada using RPM today, cause nothing that i really know uses RPM today.
      how much hype died in the recent years? celebrity nfts? influencer cryptocurrencies? ‘virtual real estate’? ‘earth 2’? tons of things had ‘super legitimate’ brands/people behind them, even coca cola i think bought some ‘virtual land’ from a startup that, you guessed it, nobody even remembers today. so many flops. often ‘millions’ received from investors. kinda like kickstarters.
      
      even though i don’t play fortnite, i think they are doing things pretty much right.
      - VirtualRealityNation
        
        Agree that Fortnite is doing things pretty well. But I guess I am having different conversations with businesses then you are. I guess we will see in a few years.
Hivemind9000

Have used it recently for VRChat. Pretty underwhelming avatar builder considering it’s their only product (and they’ve raise nearly $90m). Have played plenty of games recently where their avatar builders have way more customization and options (and end up looking much better and closer to what you want).

The main selling point is generating an avatar from a photo, but it’s not rocket science – it just chooses from a limited list of faces shapes, nose shapes and eye shapes. All ends up looking very generic and low detail (worse than Meta Horizon’s avatars).
- macoud12
  
  Yeah, reminds me a lot of how Nintendo let you make a Mii from a photo on 3DS and Wii U. But somehow worse.
Guest

Hope they can ship the rubber ones soon!
sfmike

They really just look like Horizon Avatars with lower bodies. Not really worth the millions that will disappear into the CEO’s pocket.
VR Geek

Give me an easy to implement Unity tool and I will integrate into my app.