- Avatar technology company Facemoji announced it has raised a $3 million seed funding round led by Play Ventures. These are the details.
Avatar technology company Facemoji announced it has raised a $3 million seed funding round led by Play Ventures. And Twitter, Roosh Ventures (behind the popular app Reface), Abe Burns, gaming veterans Eric Seufert, Chris Lee, and others also participated in the round.
The NYC-based company built a plug-and-play avatar system for game and app makers – which has been in testing with a select group of partners and has over 1 million users. And Facemoji is now ready for adoption by a wider group of developers and the company already has numerous major partner integrations lined up.
The Facemoji SDK is free and lets developers pipe in immersive 3D avatars and profile pictures experiences into their apps and games with a few lines of code, made possible by its lightweight proprietary rendering engine and a custom ML pipeline developed in-house. Unlike other solutions, Facemoji does not rely on Unity – which is a limitation for many developers especially big ones.
The Facemoji SDK and Figma-like 3D content creator with an NFT collection generator will soon be available via the self-serve platform Facemoji Studio. And the seed funding will help Facemoji expand its partnership efforts, alongside further research and development.
KEY QUOTES:
“Avatars are the future of how we connect online, but avatar tech is still where payments were in 2009 before Stripe came along. It’s costly, slow, and hard to build next-gen digital spaces, awesome-looking 3D content from scratch that doesn’t come with a clumsy user experience. We are changing that and opening new possibilities for the next generation of developers and creators.”
“We’ve built the best avatar tech in the world for developers, that meets their needs—essential building blocks that work well. Our passion is building deep tech, not getting distracted with hype cycles and celebs.”
“We dream of a whole new MCU-like ecosystem where UGC, IP, NFTs, and users can effortlessly transcend the silos of digital spaces, games to even animated series on Netflix. We’re still in the early days of the web3 adoption curve.”
— Robin Raszka, CEO of Facemoji
“Onchain gaming, pseudonymity, and NFTs are going to change how we connect and the content we consume online. We want to power it all and make it simple for developers—starting with profile pics.”
— COO Jon Slimak
“The Facemoji team are leaders in avatar tech, and Play Ventures is excited to be in their corner. We think Facemoji will be a power-player in the metaverse economy, helping change how developers, creators, and users create, play, and trade.”
— Phylicia Koh, VP at Play Ventures
