Ready Player Me is a cross-game avatar platform for the builders, creators, and residents of the metaverse. Today, Ready Player Me is used by over 6,500 developers worldwide, and in autumn 2022, the company raised a $56 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz. But what has been the company’s journey to becoming the leading avatar platform?
From hardware to the metaverse
Ready Player Me was founded in 2014 by Timmo Tõke, Rainer Selvet, Kaspar Tiri, and Haver Järveoja. The company, also known as Wolf 3D, started in 3D scanning, first as a studio and later with its proprietary hardware. The journey from the 3D scanning studio through 3D scanning booths into phone-based scanning technology paved the way for current success in the metaverse. The first product was a hardware-based 3D scanner. The company operated the scanners in public places like airports, museums, and conference halls worldwide. These face scans allowed the company to build a deep-learning solution that creates perfect virtual avatars from a single selfie on any device.
The company was on a mission to build an open metaverse. And 2021, we were able to witness success in this, as we saw the platform grow from 25 customers in January 2021 to over 1,000 by the end of the year. By today, the amount has increased to over 6,500, and brands such as Adidas, Dior, and Pull&Bear have found the platform.
Trind invested in Ready Player Me in 2020, followed up in the seed round of March 2021 and Series A in December 2021. The company’s latest funding round was the $56 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The future
With the new funding, the company will scale the Ready Player Me avatar creator to make it more flexible and performant for the many types of developers and build avatar content creation tools to enable developers, brands, and individual artists to create and sell avatar customization assets that work across thousands of virtual worlds. In addition, the plan is to improve avatar diversity with body types, granular clothing customization, more accurate face shape prediction, stylization, and more. Finally, the company will include other avatars on Ready Player Me. Ready Player Me is not aiming to be the only avatar in the metaverse. The goal is to help any avatars to travel across virtual worlds.
Ready Player Me exists to break down walls to build a more connected virtual world. We are the avatar interoperability layer for the metaverse.
Ready Player Me
Are you building the next metaverse success story? We would love to hear more.
