Why investment companies are bullish about the metaverse

venturebeat.com:

Presented by Hiro Capital

When Hiro Capital launched its first fund back in 2018, venture-backed gaming companies had a strong year, raising about $6.1 billion, according to Crunchbase data – yet the metaverse was still living in the realm of fiction. But then Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, a long-time fan of the metaverse concept, predicted that it would soon be “a multitrillion dollar part of the economy”; Roblox’s IPO was seen by some as one of the early building blocks of a mature metaverse; and of course Mark Zuckerberg put his money where his mouth was when he went from just name-dropping the metaverse in the company’s Q3 earnings announcement to a whole name change.

“The size and allocation of investment in metaverse as a theme has pretty much tracked with the public interest in it,” says Luke Alvarez, founding general partner of Hiro. “Suddenly there’s a lot more institutional attention, and that’s great. But at the same time, everyone’s trying to work out what the hell it means, and what is and isn’t metaverse. Within that, what are the right things to invest in?”

Hiro Capital, a European VC focused on videogames, metaverse technologies, creator platforms, and gamified fitness has launched HIRO CAPITAL II in part to answer those questions. The €300m ($340m) fund is focused on backing emerging games and metaverse innovators at Seed, A and B stages across the U.K., Europe and North America, with its first investments announced in April.

People have been dreaming about the metaverse for a long time, Alvarez says. From Alan Turing musing about the possibility of virtual imaginary worlds in the ‘50s to William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. The 1992 novel Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, first introduced the word “metaverse”