Ready Player Me, a metaverse avatar platform, raises $13M in funding

Wolf3D today announced it’s closed a round of funding for its metaverse avatar platform, Ready Player Me. It raised $13 million, with the round being led by Taavet+Sten, a firm led by the co-founder of Wise, and Sten Tamkivi, the co-founder of Teleport. Other investors in the fundraising include Konvoy Ventures, NordicNinja, and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of Github.

Ready Player Me‘s goal is to offer users a customized avatar that will carry over across the entire metaverse. Players can build their avatar from pictures or from scratch, and then use them across 900+ apps and games. The company plans to use the funding to establish its place as “the default avatar system for the metaverse.”

Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke said in a statement, “2021 has been a breakout year for Ready Player Me – our avatar platform adoption has grown from 25 to 900 companies. By giving people avatars that travel across virtual worlds, we can make the metaverse more connected. The metaverse is not one place or platform, it’s a network of thousands of experiences. With the funding, we will scale our partner network further and will build out monetization tools for developers to help them make money with avatar customization assets and NFT’s. Our goal is to become the default system for the metaverse.”

One of the company’s future projects include the addition of NFT wearables and virtual fashion for avatars. The company has previously partnered with Dior and New Balance, and most recently with Deadmau5 for the “Head5” NFT collection.