avatars

Remember the Sims? Growing up, I spent hours upon hours living my best digital life via these little digital characters. Crazy to think that the franchise sold ~200m copies and is considered one of the best selling video games of all time. It speaks to how humans have always loved creating digital versions of themselves, which is why I’m quite excited by this emergence of avatar-based platforms.

Brud is probably my favorite business at the moment. They recently raised ~38m from Sequoia, Box Group and Spark and are an avatar-media studio spinning up influencer avatars like @lilmiquela (1.5m followers on insta), @bermudaisbae (125k), @blawko22 (136k). They consider themselves the “Marvel Universe of Influencers” creating virtual avatars that live mainly on Instagram. Another is Shadows which has two virtual avatars out in the wild with the goal to spin out 20 characters per year.

People are also engaging with virtual YouTubers or VTubers, which have generated over half a billion views on YouTube last year. I.e. A.I. Channel launched in 2016 and now has over 2.4m subscribers, though these are not CGI avatars.

I’m also seeing companies that make it easy for folks to create their own avatars. Companies like Toonstar ($3m raised, Founders Fund/SnapChat, etc) enable users to create their own animated characters which can be used to create their own content. Others in this space are Genies and Zepeto. But characters made on these platforms are meant to look like cartoons, rather than those of Brud which are quite realistic. I would love to see a platform that empowers users to create their own Brud-like characters in a seamless way to then be able to use them to produce content on insta/tiktok/youtube.

A new form of self-expression, I feel it could unlock a brand new wave of creators!