Wolf3D announced a $13 million Series A funding round for its Ready Player Me, which creates cross-game animated avatars for the Metaverse, according to a company blog post.
The funding round was led by Taavet+Sten, the co-founders of Wise and Teleport and includes participation from Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub, Samsung Next, NordicNinja and Konvoy Ventures, along with others.
The company reports it will use the funds to hire developers and build its technology.
“We will build out custom content creation tools, invest in avatar art through additional styles and body types, and improve avatar performance,” the company states. “We’ll build flexible avatar APIs and SDKs for improved developer experience and ease of integration.”
They added that the funds will also help developers make money with in-game asset sales and NFTs.
Hiring workers is another priority of the fund raise and anticipate that their staff will more than double.
“We will scale from 30 people today to over 70,” they write.
According to the company, in order to unite the Metaverse — Ready Player Me conceives of “a network of thousands of virtual worlds people visit to play, work, and collaborate” — creating an avatar for each site would be inefficient and frustrating.
“It makes no sense for users to create a new avatar for each game and experience,” the company writes. “Your avatar should be able to travel with you across the metaverse.”
Ready Player Me has experienced massive growth, according to the post. In January, 2021, Ready Player Me had just 25 companies using our avatar system in their apps and games. That has grown to more than 1000, they report. However, the company has been building this technology over the last seven years.
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