Startups that look to improve an industry’s outdated infrastructure are definitely welcome in sectors like financial services and healthcare. But why would a company build infrastructure for an industry that seems to have hit its prime and zoomed past it in record time?
That was my question when I saw the news about Futureverse’s recent $54 million Series A round. The startup is a platform of 11 companies that range from gaming studios and entities that enable web3 payments, to blockchain startups providing the tools for brands and builders to more easily create content for the metaverse.
I’m missing something. Aren’t we all tired of hearing about the metaverse against our will? Haven’t we come to the realization that folks don’t want their social or work lives to look anything like Second Life?
Aaron McDonald, co-founder and CEO of Futureverse, told TechCrunch+ that some of the more vocal players in the category have made the metaverse seem like it’s one thing — a virtual world — as opposed to what he sees it as: technology that could create a virtual world and also power a lot of other things.
For McDonald, it’s not dissimilar to how we think about the internet today compared to when the term was first coined — it’s no longer a thing, but rather the thing that powers applications and websites. In line with that frame of thinking, Futureverse defines the metaverse as the collection of interoperable applications built on top of user data.
Essentially, the Futureverse is looking to help people build more encompassing experiences where the users don’t realize it’s run on the blockchain or utilizes NFTs, McDonald said.
One example of this is a game Futureverse launched with FIFA for the Women’s World Cup. Users coach a team of automated players in an immersive world, but they aren’t made aware of the fact that it is run on web3 and utilizes NFTs. To most users, then, it is just a game.
“No one should care that a specific kind of data format underlies the way that the content is interoperable,” McDonald said. “No one should be crowing about the fact that they use the PDF standard to make documents work instead of the stuff that it enables. Our mission is to make the technology invisible.”
This makes sense to me. It also seems to mirror what we are seeing with AI right now. Kirby Winfield, a pre-seed AI investor and the founder and general partner at Ascend, told me recently that the good AI companies aren’t “AI companies,” but rather companies that fix a problem using AI.
This is not dissimilar to what I found with remote work recently, either: The best remote work startups facilitate the work but are in no way “remote work” focused.
“The idea that web3 has shoved technology in people’s faces is really strange to me as someone who has a product scale background,” McDonald said. “To look at a parallel, imagine if you signed up for Netflix and in order to sign up, you had to understand the cloud infrastructure it was built on.”
Shara Senderoff, co-founder of Futureverse, recognizes that it’s difficult to have their industry plagued by stigma and assumption because of its loudest members. These dynamics influenced where the company turned to when it went out to raise, seeking out 10T Holdings to lead the company’s round because the founder of that firm just seemed to really get what the metaverse was and wasn’t, Senderoff said.
“There were just a few people who understood where the market was going,” she said. “We don’t want investors who just don’t understand the space, and a lot of people don’t.”
While gaming seems like the natural use case here, Futureverse thinks its tech can go far beyond that. McDonald mentioned a recent partnership with F1, when the racing league came to Melbourne, Australia. Futureverse helped the league build a digital platform that let it connect with fans in the moment and also continue a relationship with them after the event.
While much of what Senderoff and McDonald are saying makes a lot of sense, it will be hard for them to grow, given that they operate in a stigmatized sector that doesn’t even have a definition everyone agrees upon.
Considering there is no right or wrong here, I looked around, and they aren’t the only people who think the definition of metaverse can be more expansive.
But I think if they can keep attracting clients like FIFA and F1 to build on their platform and create things users are looking for because of the brands — and not the tech that runs them — maybe their differing definitions of the metaverse won’t matter. While I’d definitely play a game run on the blockchain, whether I knew it or not, you’ll never take my legs from me.
“When is the metaverse coming? We are in it,” McDonald said. “You are in the metaverse; it is not something that is coming. We’ve seen some early traction on the idea of immersive convergence, the breaking down of silos of user experience into a single user experience.”