LIV has announced that it has raised $8.5M Series A funding led by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from Sonny Innovation Fund, Amazon Alexa Fund, Credo Ventures, Samsung Next, and Olive Tree Capital. Along with these partners, Angel investors including Dave Wu, partner at Maveron also participated in the Series A funding. LIV is a platform that enables users to record and livestream themselves inside their favorite VR and AR games.
The funding will be used to invest in a creator and developer fund to grow the game with the company actively hiring across engineering, design, operations, marketing, and community management. LIV is aiming to revolutionize the VR streaming and content consumption experience by enabling creators to share their adventures inside VR and AR games with their fans in real-time, either as their real selves or as their favorite avatars which is known as Vtubing.
To help with this, VR app developers are integrating the LIV SDK to unlock a suite of capture tools and technologies to their users, generating video content for their apps. At this time, LIV supports more than half of the Top 100 VR games with over 2200 developers already on the platform and boasts of 13,000 monthly active creators who generate more than 30,000 hours of content every month.
LIV’s technology works live with no post-production needed and creators are able to either film their real bodies inside their favorite VR game or transform themselves into a customized avatar that supports full-body tracking, finger tracking, eye animation, and lip tracking, as well as full-suite utility stack for seeing stream chat, alert, and notifications in the headset.
LIV plans on releasing their proprietary all-software-based volumetric streaming technology and destination platform in 2022 that allows creators and fans to connect in ways that are unique to spatial technologies, leaning on what makes VR and AR special: the sense of presence. It allows users to capture the entire world and the people that inhabit it for playback or live consumption by anyone, on any device.
It opens up an entirely new category of social experiences between fans, creators, and gamers. Dr. Doom, Co-founder & CEO @ LIV commented:
We’ve been on a mission to empower creators in VR and AR to share their adventures with their friends, family and fans since 2016. As former competitive gamers and VR streamers ourselves, we know what we want & need out of the streaming & casting experience, and set out to solve our own problems. This raise allows us to bring on board top tier investors and strategic partners that will help us get closer to our goal of LIV existing on every headset and game.
Jens Hilgers, Founding General Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures will be part of the board as well and he added:
LIV is ushering in a completely new content-sharing format that enables users and creators to capture their VR/AR gameplay, stream it to an audience, and interact in ways unique to spatial technologies. Since their 2018 launch, LIV has become the leading app for live streaming AR & VR games, with a large and continuously growing community of creators, and support for more than half of top 30 VR games. We believe VR & AR will bring forward a distinct new platform for content creation, and the VR natives behind LIV are leading the way.
LIV will share additional details about the platform’s potential release date or window in the upcoming days. For additional details, you can check out the official website as well.
