Avatar company Gizmoz raises $6.5M

Gizmoz, an Israel-based company that lets you create 3D avatars, has raised $6.5 million in a second round of venture funding.

DoCoMo Capital — a subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest cell phone operator — led the round, which Gizmoz plans to use for expansion in Asia. ngi capital and previous investors Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital also participated.

Gizmoz is also unveiling a new partnership with AOL, which will allow AOL Instant Messaging users to animate their chats with Gizmoz avatars. The company says it has already created animations to illustrate more than 50 trigger words that can be used in a chat, such as “blabla” and “brb”.

Gizmoz isn’t the first company to bring avatars to web chats — see, for example, our coverage of Fix8 — but the partnership and the funding are still good news. The company, which also has offices in Menlo Park, Calif., faces some tough competition, including Big Stage, a company that was founded by a former Activision executive. We were pretty impressed by BigStage’s avatars when we saw them last month (our coverage).

Gizmoz previously raised $6.5 million (read our coverage, which features a rather disconcerting avatar of VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall).

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