Ready Player Me raises millions to ready avatars for inter-metaverse travel

The Future. Ready Player Me, which allows people to create avatars based on their likeness and be used across multiple metaverse destinations, raised a huge Series B to supercharge its ambition of bringing its tools to the masses. With the newly-created Metaverse Standards Forum (which includes companies like Epic,  Meta, and Microsoft) starting to figure out how to actually connect disparate metaverses, Ready Player Me could be the avatar-identity that acts as the glue between them.

Self-render
According to Fast Company, Ready Player Me is ready to help outfit people’s avatars for the whole metaverse.

• The Swedish Web3 startup raised a $56 million Series B from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, the founders of Roblox and Twitch, and Kevin Hart’s venture fund, HartBeat.
• With a total of $72 million in funding, Ready Player Me plans to build out its US team and transition from mostly developer-focused tools to those geared toward general users.
• That includes letting people create virtual outfits and accessories that can be bought, sold, and carried across various metaverses.

Five million users have already created avatars using Ready Player Me (users just need to upload a photo and let the system do the rest), which are currently compatible with 3,000 different apps.

And big brands have also given the company a seal of approval — adidas, Warner Bros., and Dior have all released products that can be integrated with the avatars.

It’s a big world, after all
What makes Ready Player Me stand out from all the other avatar-creation platforms is that it’s focused on letting users build avatars that not only can be used across different metaverse platforms, but automatically transform their look to the aesthetic of the metaverse they’re in — what Andreessen Horowtiz partner Jonathan Lai calls an “interoperable identity protocol for the open metaverse.”

Ready Player Me co-founder and CEO Timmu Tõke said, “The metaverse is not one game, one place, or one platform […] So, it makes sense for the users of the metaverse to have an avatar that travels with them across many virtual worlds.”