South Korea-based real-world metaverse startup DoubleMe said Wednesday it has raised $25 million in a Series A funding co-led by Coentry Investment and NH Investment with a strategic investment from Samsung Electronics.
DoubleMe said in a statement that it plans to launch TwinWorld’s first commercial version later this year with support for various augmented reality (AR) /mixed reality (MR) headset devices such as Nreal.
The fresh funding will fuel platform development, customer acquisition, marketing, and global talent acquisition, it said.
DoubleMe is a real-world metaverse startup specializing in real-time personal volumetric capture technology and operating in Seoul, London, and Sunnyvale, CA. It partners with 15 telcos worldwide on creating real-time 3D reconstruction and streaming (holoportation) GPU cloud on 5G Mobile Edge Computing (MEC).
It 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.
By combining personal holoportation and the real-world metaverse, TwinWorld, DoubleMe aims to build the global scale user-generated mixed reality experiences.
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 literally use bare hands to build the mixed reality fantasy worlds through Hololens 2, iPhone, and Android phones. When personalizing your worlds, multiple users can enter the space as full-body 3D avatars or real-time holograms.” said Albert Kim, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DoubleMe.
According to the statement, 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 accumulated revenues from its paying customers for seventeen months since its launch.
DoubleMe 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. The team participated in the Sparklabs Accelerator and Samsung C-Lab Outside programs. Before this round, the firm raised $1 million seed funding and $16 million research and development (R&D) grants from the Korean and United Kingdom governments.