Wolf3D, the Estonian startup behind web-based avatar creator Ready Player Me, has closed a $13 million funding round. The company says it will use the funds to further build out its avatar creation tools and eventually allow developers to earn money through the sale of in-game assets and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Ready Player Me studio Wolf3D has secured a $13 million Series A funding round, which was led by Wise and Teleport co-founders Taavet+Sten, and features participation from GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Samsung Next, NordicNinja, Konvoy Ventures, and others. The news was first reported by Venture Beat.

Read Player Me allows anyone to create and customize their own avatar, which can then be imported into social VR platforms such as VRChat, Spatial, LIV, MeetinVR, and more.

Working on both desktop and mobile devices, Ready Player Me presents an easy way of doing so, letting you use the same skin across multiple platforms—some 900+ apps and games now, the company says.

Image courtesy Wolf3D

With the fresh funding, Wolf3D says in a blog post that it will build out its custom content creation tools, invest in avatar art through additional styles and body types, and improve avatar performance.

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In addition to building APIs and SDKs to improve the developer experience, the studio says it will also be focusing on making Ready Player Me a “revenue generator for developers” by allowing third-party devs to sell in-game assets and NFTs—cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain and can be easily bought, sold and traded.

The company hasn’t said when it will roll out its monetization strategy, however it lists it as “coming soon.”

In the meantime, Wolf3D says its scaling up from 30 people today to over 70, with multiple roles offered across Europe and the US. The latest funding round brings the company’s lifetime outside investment to $16.5 million, following a $2.1 million seed round in July 2020.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Anonmon

    So how many times are people going to try and push this NFT bs, with literally anyone who has a working understanding of how computers have worked in the last 40 years, and for the rest of eternity, would tell you in unison that they’re completely and utterly moronic?
    Oh, you have a non fudgeable receipt that you “own” this digital thing? That’s all well and good, but you do understand that, for a computer to display ANYTHING, you’re literally telling everyone “Hey, download this to your local machine, which once it exists as data on this local machine, whatever that data is can be pulled and saved locally, usually with relative ease?” Why does having a receipt matter when everyone equally can have the exact same thing?
    “Owning” something has legitimacy in reality, because there will only ever be the one physical item. Even if there are many like it, there will only ever be one of any specific item. Perfect replicas aren’t as valuable as “The real thing” for that reason.
    Digital data on the other hand, literal copy/paste is how all of computing works. All we ever see is data received from somewhere else on our machines. Thus, everything intended to be displayed on a computer is with the expectation that if someone wants to, they can save it and in essence have a perfect copy that will last for as long as the hardware that’s storing this data will last for.

    Daft, the lot of anyone into that sort of thing.

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    • James Cobalt

      Even if there are many like it, there will only ever be one of any specific item. Perfect replicas aren’t as valuable as “The real thing” for that reason.

      Look, I think NFTs are silly. But what you’re describing is also what NFTs are. What you think is a perfect copy, is only a perfect copy to our physical senses. Not all of the code is in the original “thing”. It uses a token system, so most of it is, but a teeny tiny bit of it is with the owner, and another teeny tiny bit is in the blockchain. You have to combine all three to verify that the file is the original. So it is a perfect copy as far as your senses are concerned, but it’s not the original.

      The question is, does this matter? What makes “the real thing” more valuable than a perfect replica? It’s not that it’s a real thing. It’s the story we tell about the real thing. Aesthetically, a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa should be just as valuable as the original. But we like to ascribe all sorts of meaning to things based on their creation stories and relationships to so-called important people and events.

      This spoon was in the mouth of a baby Abraham Lincoln!!! Oh wait nope it was just in the mouth of another dumb baby throw it in the trash

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