Genies has raised $65 million to increase its avator creator, which the enterprise is touting for virtual identity and wearable digital goods.
Genies desires to turn into the virtual identity for persons to completely express themselves in the digital world. It began with celebrities to capture moments — in particular through the pandemic — for events such as album releases, song drops, and guest appearances. That has helped celebrities create income even when they can not go someplace in individual. And now Genies is expanding this to wider groups of customers in beta kind.
Bond led the round, with participation from NEA, Breyer Capital, Tull Investment Group, NetEase, Dapper Labs, and Coinbase Ventures. Bond was began by Mary Meeker and other former Kleiner Perkins Digital Growth Fund leaders in 2018, and it has now raised more than $3.25 billion across two funds.
The revenue will be used to invest in the technologies behind the Genie avatar program and to continue to construct out the digital goods marketplace on Dapper Lab’s Flow platform. That will enable it to take benefit of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which enable customers to develop uniquely identifiable digital products with the assist of blockchain, the safe and transparent digital ledger behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
“We’re going to offer tools so that a six- to 16-year-old teen in high school can create their own digital wearable and goods collection and then release it in the marketplace and sell to the masses as well,” mentioned Genies CEO Akash Nigam, in an interview with GamesBeat. “The fact that we can allow anybody to sell digital goods and wearables is what gets me really excited.”
The NFT craze
Dapper Labs is the group behind NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, which have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in NFT sales. A lot of persons are excited about the nascent technologies of NFTs — which has benefited from the craze stirred by Elon Musk‘s endorsement (and his wife/musician Grimes), Bitcoin breaking $50,000, GameStop shareholders’ grassroots revolt against Wall Street, and NBA Top Shot (listen to this ESPN podcast about it).
“It’s exciting for the whole category,” Nigam mentioned. “The next big play is Genies is going to be powering the whole marketplace. And we announced our partnership with Warner Music Group. We’ve become the official avatar and digital events distributor for all of their talent underneath that umbrella.”
NFTs have been usually component of the Genies vision, but Nigam didn’t feel they would go mainstream for a even though. Now that they are, the enterprise has begun to roll out its NFT approach with NFT art drops for celebrities like Mendes.
“The cool thing is that Genies isn’t an NFT company. And we’re also not a crypto company,” Nigam mentioned. “It’s like we’ve been talking about the philosophies and concepts of NFTs for years, but we’ve been talking about it as a comparison to digital goods, on skins that you see in video games. And we’ve talked about unlimited capacity, exclusive capacity, and so forth. But never said the acronym NFT until we started to realize what was going on in the past year. We’ve had this consumer-first approach outside of the NFTs, and this is what we were doing this entire time anyways.”
Upcoming partnerships
Later this year, Genies plans to roll out hundreds of partnerships this year exactly where customers can use their Genie to enable for a “virtual portable identity,” which customers will be in a position to take with them across the web. It not too long ago partnered with Giphy, which has more than 700 million customers who go to the search engine every day to locate animated GIFs, or these silly animated pictures connected with web memes and recorded in graphics interchange format (GIF).
To upload a Genie avatar into Giphy, Genies customers develop a Genie in the Genies app and then use the deep hyperlink to connect them to Giphy. Once in the Giphy app, customers can upload their Genies to their channel and use it all through Giphy. Earlier, Genies had been employed exclusively by celebrities, tastemakers, and influencers as a way to memorialize moments in the digital world. The enterprise has thousands of celebrities working with its Genies for album releases, song announcements, and more. Celebrities working with Genies contain Shawn Mendes, J.Lo, Offset, Rihanna, DJ Khaled, Justin Bieber, Cardi B, and J Balvin.
Now customers can design and style custom avatars and get digital fantastic products in a brand and celebrity marketplace just before working with them through customized Giphy integration on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and other folks. Users can develop their personal restricted edition digital goods in the Genies marketplace as “drops.” The customer knowledge contains developing a digital character of your self from choices which includes hairstyle, body sort, clothes, fantastical accessories, and a increasing list of issues that could come from your imagination.
Nigam believes Genies avatars will make the metaverse achievable, but not as a single virtual world. Rather, persons can take their avatars and move from spot to spot in a distributed metaverse. He mentioned the partnership with Giphy will let customers culturally accessories their digital selves and use Genies in digital communities exactly where they currently belong.
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Bond’s Mary Meeker
Bond was formed a couple of years ago by Mary Meeker and other former leaders at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Meeker will now join the Genies board of directors.
“Mary Meeker is joining the board, which we’re very excited about,” he mentioned. “What closed the deal was Mary Meeker joining the board.”
In a statement, Meeker mentioned Genies has opened the door to a new sort of virtual self-expression that is altering how persons interact on the internet. She mentioned you can use your Genie avatar to be any person you want to be as you communicate digitally. She sees it as assisting to develop the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
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“The investment is based on what business really is right now and the potential for metaverse,” Nigam mentioned. “If you look at how these partnerships and this traction is coming to a head, the potential is big.”
A digital marketplace
Nigam mentioned that the small business is based on celebrities driving the digital likeness marketplace and promoting products to their fans, who in turn can express themselves with their personal Genie avatars.
“When you put all that flywheel together, that’s like the new identity layer for the internet,” Nigam mentioned. “We’re just stockpiling all of our talent and all their Genies, and their digital goods are wearable, so that when our marketplace with Dapper Labs goes live this summer, we’re going to be able to release everybody in volume in our own marketplace.”
Later in 2021, Genies will launch a secondary digital goods marketplace, enabling customers to get, sell and trade digital wearables through a partnership with Dapper Labs’ Flow — the blockchain for open worlds. Nigam sees the Genies avatar as a virtual transportable identity that persons can use wherever they travel across the web. Examples of digital goods contain a pair of footwear, a jacket, a style-inspired hot polka dot collection, a spirit animal creature head collection, a Bitcoin-inspired spacesuit, and a fantastical warrior outfit for Pride month. Most products are developed with no the limitations of the physical world and are meant to be fantastical to represent diverse personalities.
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Genies has been employed for virtual getting personalities by celebrities which includes Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes, Rihanna, Migos, Cardi B, J Balvin, and thousands more. The enterprise also has partnerships with brands such as Gucci.
Other new and current investors in this round contain Camilla Cabello, Polychain, Amplo, Foundation Capital, Redsea Ventures, Hashkey, Shrug, A Capital, Tamarack Ventures, and Gaingels. Nigam began the enterprise in 2017 and it has 60 workers. The enterprise is hiring and it plans to make some executive hires as properly as engineering hires.
“We’re not a high burn-rate company,” Nigam mentioned.