Korean real-world metaverse startup DoubleMe has raised $25 million in a Series A funding co-led by Coentry Investment and NH Investment with a strategic investment from Samsung Electronics.
The Seoul-based company provides TwinWorld, a real-world metaverse platform that allows users to build and share mixed reality (MR) experiences in any physical location without technical expertise. Users can place digital objects into the real world by simply using their hands.
Since the launch in November 2020, TwinWorld’s user-generated mixed reality spaces spanned thirty-four countries, with paying customers in seventeen cities worldwide.
“You use bare hands to build the mixed reality fantasy worlds through Hololens 2, iPhone, and Android phones,” says Albert Kim, the founder and CEO of DoubleMe. He added, “when personalizing your worlds, multiple users can enter the space as full-body 3D avatars or real-time holograms.”
Paying customers can “lock-in” their mixed reality worlds on given physical spaces that disable other users from tampering with the 3D decoration. TwinWorld generated $4.5 million in accumulated revenues from its paying customers for seventeen months since its launch.
A commercial version in 2022
DoubleMe plans to launch TwinWorld’s first commercial version later this year with support for various AR/MR headset devices like Nreal. The fresh funding will fuel platform development, customer acquisition, marketing, and global talent acquisition.
The team is currently developing a series of volumetric video capture technologies, including real-time human and spatial 3D scan and streaming on GPU clouds over 5G Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) by partnering with fifteen major global telcos, including Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, BT, Singtel, and SK Telecom.
In 2015, Albert Kim, Michael Kuczynski, and Heeyoung Kim co-founded DoubleMe. Before this round, the firm raised $1 million in seed funding and $16 million in R&D grants from the Korean and UK governments. The team participated in the Sparklabs Accelerator and Samsung C-Lab Outside programs.
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