Today Wolf3D, an Estonian startup building a virtual identity platform for games and VR, has raised around €1.2 million from Trind Ventures, Presto Ventures, Koha Capital, Spring Capital and Contriber Ventures with participation from a few angels. The company has now raised a total of around €2.3 million.
Founded in 2014, Wolf3D’s team has since built a successful avatar business and technology, working with many of the top 10 game and VR developers. The startup is now making its technology available for small and mid-sized developers and providing the first selected companies their avatar creation solution for free.
The software called Ready Player Me allows anyone to create a personal full-body avatar from a selfie that’s “transportable” between all of the games they are integrated with. One of Wolf3D’s key advantages is being able to support many different art styles of avatars for all kinds of game styles and genres.
“Games have become social media platforms – most of what people do in games these days is socializing,” said Timmu Tõke, the founder and CEO of Wolf3D. Illustrating the trend, Travis Scott’s record-breaking Fortnite concert back in April gathered more than 12 million people in a virtual space.
On the other hand, gaming identities – avatars – are not evolving. Players’ avatars are generic versions of themselves that they create from limited pre-made pieces. Wolf3D believes that the future of our gaming identities is going to look a lot more like our social media profiles – a curated version of yourself that looks a bit different depending on the environment and use case but always ties back to your real-life identity.
Wolf3D’s long term goal is to make their solution a link between many different virtual experiences, adding them together into one big virtual world that you can explore seamlessly with your avatar and the same set of friends.
The startup believes that it’s unlikely that there will be one big “metaverse” that will dominate, and that is why cross-platform services such as Ready Player Me are necessary for simplifying players’ gaming experience across many virtual worlds.
The company launched the first version of Ready Player Me back in May as a web-based avatar generating tool for VR and will now use the latest funding to take the solution to the next level with full-body personal avatars for games.
