Ready Player Me, a platform to build dynamic cross-game avatars for virtual worlds, raises $56M led by a16z

techcrunch.com:

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg was roundly mocked for the bad graphics in his preview of a new expansion of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s metaverse effort. His quick response promising better avatars for the actual launch speaks to just how much appearances do matter in these situations. Now, in a spot of perfect timing, a startup out of Talinn, Estonia, called Ready Player Me — which has built a popular platform for creating dynamic, animated avatars to use across virtual worlds built and operated by others — is announcing $56 million in funding to grow its business.

The company today handles about 5 million avatars from across some 3,000 partners, and the funding will be used in three basic areas: to continue hiring (the company has offices in NYC); to expand the platform with more developer tools, including those for monetization, and to build more services for creators using Ready Player Me (it offers both an SDK and API); and to double down on the idea that creating single avatars, and identities, that are interoperable and can be used across multiple virtual environments will improve overall user experience, and thus help grow user numbers.

“Our bigger vision is to connect the metaverse through avatars,” said Timmu Toke, co-founder and CEO, Ready Player Me, in an interview. “There may be metaverse [experiences] owned by big companies, who will make all the rules, but there is a vision of an open one where people can travel, built by millions of developers, where no one controls the whole thing. Like the internet. We’re trying to push the world towards that metaverse.”

The Series B is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, the storied VC that has in recent times doubled down on all things web3, including metaverse technology; and it