Futureverse Launches Born Ready Ventures and Partners with Outlier Ventures to Help Power the Metaverse
A big splash for the future of AI and metaverse tech building.
For many, talk of the metaverse evokes images of entering an immersive digital world while wearing a clunky VR headset—imagery that’s helped perpetuate the idea that the metaverse is a place we have to go to and access to participate in.
For Aaron McDonald and Shara Senderoff—co-founders of Futureverse and its recently launched venture fund Born Ready—the metaverse isn’t a world we need to access, it's the world we’re already living in.
“The average person born today is going to spend 46 years of their life looking at a screen,” McDonald said to me in a recent conversation with Senderoff. “You are in the metaverse already. The idea that there is this digital world/digital economy and a physical world/physical economy doesn’t exist. If you take the digital out of the world today, society collapses. We live in the metaverse.”
Futureverse has partnered with web3 start-up investor Outlier Ventures to launch the Futureverse Base Camp accelerator program starting in January 2024, which will receive funding from Born Ready and will select a cohort of early-stage startups that are building metaverse apps and experiences across The Root Network as well as applications on top of it.
Decentraland held a Metaverse Pride Week earlier this year
McDonald and Senderoff co-founded Futureverse alongside Marco Brondani and Daniel Gillespie to help address the current and future needs of the metaverse,merging 11 different web3 companies together last year. The goal is to grow, expand and build the tech across The Root Network, a blockchain and suite of tools to build metaverse apps, games and experiences. By rolling up nearly a dozen infrastructure and content companies into one collaborative ecosystem, Futureverse is hoping to deliver the essential components for constructing metaverse applications while maintaining one of the world’s largest digital collectible communities.
“That’s a big part of what we’re doing—building the underlying technology and incubating the ideas that will show everyone how the technology benefits them—not showing them what’s beneath the hood because no one cares,” Senderoff said to me. “When I text you, I’m not saying, ‘Hey I just texted you on iOS version 16.1.’ You don’t talk about that stuff. We’re here to prove and show that the metaverse is becoming a thing whether we like it or not. There’s no ‘the metaverse is dead,’ that’s like saying the Internet is dead.”
Futureverse’s comprehensive technology platform includes a robust suite of proprietary AI content generation tools designed to enhance music, objects, characters and animations comprising the metaverse.
In the last year, the startup formed global strategic partnerships with renowned organizations and innovators including Wimbledon, FIFA, Authentic Brands Group (ABG), Mastercard, Death Row Records, Wētā Workshop, Snoop Dogg, Timbaland, Keanu Reeves and Alexandra Grant. Recently, the company announced a strategic partnership with blue-chip NFT collection Cool Cats, integrating the iconic Cool Cats brand with Futureverse's technology.
source: Statista
Still, it’s early for Futureverse. “We’re working out how to build a company and support a decentralized ecosystem,” McDonald said. “While Futureverse is the creator of The Root Network, our vision can’t come to life unless we have a huge community of people building with us. We’re big believers in the notion of the open metaverse and we wanted to find a vehicle to help cultivate that community of builders around the infrastructure that Futureverse was creating.”
Born Ready has a $50 million venture fund and studio that focuses on accelerating the development and adoption of emerging AI tech.
“We think that the metaverse is the collection of interoperable applications, experiences, and games, as opposed to being a singular platform where all of those things exist,” McDonald said. “Our job—as Futureverse—is to provide the tools and protocols that make that interoperable metaverse possible. Born Ready’s job is to then find the best builders in the world who can build those experiences on those interoperable tools, find the best IP to activate inside this environment, and create the best partnerships with the best brands to help supercharge this technology.”
The 12-week Futureverse Base Camp accelerator program will provide participants with mentorship, education, and $100,000 in funding. Born Ready has already made investments in a variety of companies, including former head of Adidas’ Yeezy Innovation Lab’s high-tech sneaker startup, FCTRY Lab, Power’d Digital, Polemos, Walker Labs and others.
“The challenge that always exists in doing something like we’re doing is to make sure you make the right bets and to create a cohesive ecosystem of companies that can work together and help each other grow,” McDonald said. “A lot of funds who are just getting into the AI space because it’s the latest ‘trend’ are going to see a lot of shit and invest in a lot of shit. We’ve got the experience to understand what’s real, what’s not, and what’s going to make a difference.”
“In order for the generally accepted idea of our progression to a digital society to exist, we need an Internet native protocol for value—just like we do for everything else on the Internet,” McDonald said. “Blockchains are Internet native protocols for values, and if we think that lots of processes and assets live in the digital space, blockchains provide the best kind of infrastructure for those things to live on,” he said. They “will be the foundation of value on the Internet—there’s nothing stopping it.”
McDonald believes that consumers' actions continue to demonstrate that they want more cohesive, converged user experiences—not silos of user experiences.
“The best example of how that’s come together in recent times is the extreme growth of commerce on TikTok,” he said. “People want their communications, their media, social experiences, and their commerce all to happen in one place, and so the metaverse is just about creating more connectivity between those processes and breaking down those experience silos.”
In many ways, what Futureverse is building isn’t a destination, it’s a new way of interacting with the Internet and society at large.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” McDonald said. “The way that products become successful is that you show people what’s new, different, interesting and magical about them—not by telling them how it works. No one created a world-leading product by focusing on telling how it works under the hood. They did it by showing people something magical that they couldn’t do before.”