Will Akash Nigam’s Genies become a major business in the metaverse
GENIES, A DIGITAL AVATAR CREATOR CO-FOUNDED BY AKASH NIGAM, GETS FUNDING FROM FORMER DISNEY CEO BOB IGER
This article, first published March 14, 2022, is being re-published since Global Indian Times has also begun posting on Substack.
https://www.globalindiantimes.com/globalindiantimes/2022/3/14/genies-akash-nigam
Photo: Akash Nigam
March 14, 2022
Genies, a Los Angeles based company that creates digital avatars of people, today announced that Bob Iger, former Disney Chief Executive, is investing in the company and joined its Board of Directors.
"I've always been drawn to the intersection between technology and art, and Genies provides unique and compelling opportunities to harness the power of that combination to enable new forms of creativity, expression and communication," Bob Iger said in a statement. During the 15 years he ran Disney, its market value rose five-fold to $257 billion.
Since Genies’ founding in 2016, “our mission has been to be the digital identity that allows people to freely express their authentic selves,” notes co-founder and Chief Executive Akash Nigam, 29-years-old, in a blog post on the company’s site. In other words, as a banner on Genies’ site puts it, in the digital world you can become “The fantasy version of you, you, you.”
Genies has created thousands of digital avatars for professional baseball players, such as Houston Astros’ Jose Altuve, American football players and music stars like Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Shawn Mendes. The stars use their avatars to announce newly released songs on social media as well as to endorse brands for a fee. Genies has also teamed up with the Warner Music and Universal Music groups to create avatars and wearables for their artists. It also sells Gucci branded wearables for its avatars.
Through Genies, users can purchase limited edition non-fungible tokens (NFT) like sneakers or hats worn by the avatars of stars and create their own avatars that wear these digital goods. These avatars can be used on messaging services, virtual spectator spaces such as concerts and online games.
NFTs are used by artists, musicians, photographers and other creators to convert their physical work into a digital asset with a unique, identity, which has so far been impossible to erase, using crypto-based blockchain technologies.
Genies was founded in 2016, by Akash Nigam and Evan Rosenbaum who met while in college. Nigam was at the University of Michigan while Rosenbaum was at the University of Pennsylvania.
While in college, Nigam was eager to found a startup for creating an app. His parents gave him an ultimatum: Raise $3 million or stay in school, according to Forbes. “Like any parent, and especially as an immigrant parent, I wanted him to finish college,” Nigam’s father Pavan Nigam told CNN Money. Pavan, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, was the cofounder of medical website WebMD and is now an investor in technology ventures.
Akash chose to drop out. Rosenbaum, a third cofounder, and he raised seed funding to create a group chat app, Blend, based in San Jose, California. While Blend failed, seeing the big potential demand for digital avatars, they set up Genies.
Akash Nigam was born and raised in Mountain View, in California’s Silicon Valley. Last August, Nigam bought a home in Venice, a Los Angeles suburb, for $4.3 million.
Looking to the future, Nigam, notes in a blog post, that, “We’ve always had the vision to put the control in the creators’ hands through self-serve tools.” The company plans to soon provide digital tools which will enable users to create their own avatars and wearables, convert them into NFTs, as well as sell these products on Genies.
The company’s tools will also enable creators to use their avatars in a movie or show, create a Tik-Tok series and build a virtual world to host events, concerts and whatever else they desire.
The creators will own a product they create on Genies and all its commercial rights. Apparently, Genies will charge users a fee for its creative tools as well as collect a fee on all sales transactions.
So far Genies has raised $52 million at a valuation of over $100 million, according to Crunchbase. The size and valuation of today’s funding round, including from Iger, has not been disclosed.
Genies intends to create a universal avatar system that can be used across an open metaverse. These avatars will be designed in Genies’ app and outfitted with Genies’ digital clothes, accessories, hairstyles, and more.
Metaverse describes a three-dimensional digital space, combining gaming, social networking and ecommerce, that functions as a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet. Genies expects a person’s 3D avatars will be walking around in metaverses and use wearables to dress up as an astronaut, alien or cyborg.
In October, Facebook announced the change of its name to Meta. In a letter posted on Meta’s site, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg states, “In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today...within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”
According to a blog post on Genies’ site, you will “have the choice to be a different person or character in the metaverse based on how you are feeling that day.”
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