Hyper raises $3.6M from Amazon and more for its iPhone-based, VTuber-friendly avatar platform

techcrunch.com:

VTubers — online personalities who use motion-capture-powered manga- and anime-inspired avatars to interact with the world alongside games, over YouTube, and in other places — have become big business, with the most popular of them collectively racking up hundreds of millions of hours of viewership in a month, along with loyal fan bases, lucrative sponsorships and demand for more.

Now, it appears that big tech is starting to take some notice. A startup called Hyper that’s built technology to make the development and use of these avatars into a much easier (and less costly) enterprise has picked up funding from Amazon and other key investors that include some big names in the world of content and avatar creation.

The company is not yet disclosing usage figures, but the backers here speak to some interesting traction. The seed round of $3.6 million is being led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation also from MakersFund, Twitch owner Amazon’s Alexa Fund, and individuals such as Trevor McFedries, a founder of Brud, Inc. (creator of Lil Miquela); Robin Raskza, the CEO and founder of Facemoji (avatar platform acquired by Google); and Dan Romero (CEO and founder of social media platform Farcaster).

As of 2020, it was estimated that there were around 10,000 VTubers active online. That is just a sliver of the number of gaming streamers active the market today — 15 million on Twitch with an audience of around 1 billion users annually — let alone the tens of millions of creators running channels on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and so many other places on the long tail new media horizon.

But Hyper — by replacing a typically fussy set-up of motion capture suits, costly computer and camera equipment and software and bandwidth overhead