Estonian Ready Player Me gets €56.4M from a16z

Ready Player Me, a Tallinn-based cross-game avatar platform, has secured €56.4 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other notable investors include David Baszucki (co-founder of Roblox) and Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch), Silicon Canals reports.

• Founded in 2014 (formerly known as Wolf3D) by Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, Rainer Selvet, and Timmu Tõke, Ready Player Me builds an avatar system across the metaverse. The platform also provides new revenue opportunities through avatar asset sales and a cross-game economy.
• The company has over 5 million avatars across approximately 3000 partners, including VRChat, Spatial, Somnium Space, RTFKT, and many more. It also works with individual creators and fashion brands such as Adidas, New Balance, Dior, Pull&Bear, and Warner Brothers.

“Ready Player Me is loved by both developers and players as the largest platform for avatar-systems-as-a-service and is well on their way to building the interoperable identity protocol for the open Metaverse,”

Jonathan Lai, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, comments on the startup.

• Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, provided most of the funding this round. It is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm with $19.2B in assets under management across multiple funds. The firm invests in seed to late-stage companies across the consumer, enterprise, bio/healthcare, crypto, and fintech industries. It recently supported the $4.2 million round for Regression Games.
• The fresh funding comes eight months after the company raised €13 million in a Series A round back in December last year.

This new funding will allow Ready Player Me to continue scaling the avatar system to make it more flexible for developers. It will also help to create new tools to help developers monetize with avatar assets. As well as build tools for individual creators to participate in the avatar marketplace.