Portfolio company Ready Player Me raises $56M led by Andreessen Horowitz

As announced on TechCrunch, Startup Wise Guys portfolio company Ready Player Me has raised Series B round in the amount of $56 million lead by a16z, and including other big gun investors like co-founder of Roblox; co-founder of Twitch; and even the TikTokers D’Amelio family.

The Estonian company, co-founded by Timmu Tõke (CEO), Rainer Selvet (CTO), Kaspar Tiri (CCO) and Haver Järveoja (COO), started its journey with professional, hardware-based 3D scanners looking like cosmic eggs and located in various public spaces. As a result they collected a 20K+ high quality facial scans’ database that helped build their breakthrough product – dynamic, animated avatars that can be used across virtual worlds. Launched in 2020, it hit the perfect timing when the world went online due to the emerging covid pandemic and solutions for more immersive digital experiences became ever increasing.

Before that for 4 years the team had been servicing high end enterprise clients building custom made avatars and avatar systems for them. They were cash flow positive and doing well, however, they saw issues with scalability of this business model and decided to drop it and build an end-to-end solution rather focused at developers as their core customer.