Avatar platform Ready Player Me raises $13 million in Series A funding

Ready Player Me, a startup letting users create a single avatar for use across virtual platforms, announced Monday that it raised $13 million in Series A funding. 

Wise and Teleport co-founders Taavet+Sten led this round. Additional support came from GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Samsung Next, NordicNinja, Konvoy Ventures, the NFT influencer Gmoney — who had collaborated with Adidas Originals for its first NFT drop — and others

To create their avatar, a user can either upload a selfie of themself or select from a list of premade avatars to customize. This single avatar can then be used across numerous apps, games and other platforms.

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“Avatars created using Ready Player Me are not NFTs, but it’s possible to use assets from selected NFT collections as customization options for the avatars,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke told The Block in an email

With this injection of new funding, the firm intends to build out tools for game developers to sell NFTs and in-game avatar customization assets as part of its broader goal of becoming the default metaverse avatar creation service. 

“Currently, we are working on a tool that will let developers using our platform sell customization assets directly in their apps and games through their existing in-app purchases solutions,” Tõke adds. 

Ready Player Me’s past partnerships include Head5, a collaborative NFT drop from music industry figures deadmau5, Smearball and Pixelynx.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.