Ready Player Me

What is the mission? 

Become “the Switzerland of avatar providers” and the “Facebook Login” button on every single metaverse application. RPM will be the trusted hodler of billions of dollars of virtual assets their users have bought to enrich their digital personas.

Who are the founders?

Timmu Tõke (CEO), Kaspar Tiri, Haver Järveoja and Rainer Selvet have basically built nothing else than avatars in their professional careers. They founded the company in 2014 first focused on heavy duty hardware: the first product was a professional, hardware-based 3D scanner, operated in public places like airports, museums, and conference halls around the world. Most persistently wandering through every nook of the avatar idea maze for 7 years, they finally hit exponential growth with their software stack riding the web3 and metaverse movement.

Why did Sten get involved?

Several parallel paths have taken me to the metaverse topic:

Skype → building remote work tools → building a distributed org ahead of time → curiosity about future of work → Teleport → Topia → good grasp of why and how work moves into virtual environments

Overall geekery → early adopter of VR tech (trying Oculus before a16z invested; Mozilla VR hubs, etc) → casually following market innovations (Varjo, etc) → realism about where the tech capabilities really are

2013 Bitcoin → 2017 ICO boom → 2019 DeFi → 2020 NFT wave (incl Flamingo DAO) → excitement about the frontier of digital personas, trustless protocols, concept of fungibility, web3 as a cultural movement

I have a strong belief that we will eventually carry out most valuable work in increasingly immersive virtual environments, where gaming just leads the way of what’s possible.

RPM is a way to bet on not an application, but a core infrastructure component of future metaverses, regardless of where the iteration around use cases goes.