March 31, 2022 — LIV, a platform that enables users to record and livestream themselves inside their favorite VR and AR games, today announced an $8.5 million Series A funding led by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Amazon Alexa Fund, Credo Ventures, Samsung Next, and Olive Tree Capital. Angel investors including Dave Wu, partner @ Maveron also participated. The funding will be used to invest in a creator and developer fund and grow the team, with the company actively hiring across engineering, design, operations, marketing and community management.
LIV is revolutionizing 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 (commonly referred to as mixed reality capture, or MRC) or as their favorite avatar (commonly referred to as Vtubing). VR app developers integrate the LIV SDK to unlock a suite of capture tools & technologies to their users, generating video content for their apps.
(LIV’s real-time mixed reality technology – credits: tiktok.com/@tnybeats)
LIV supports more than half of the Top100 VR games with over 2200 developers on the platform and boasts of 13,000 monthly active creators who generate more than 30,000 hours of content every month.
The technology works live with no post-production needed. 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 a full-suite utility stack for seeing stream chat, alerts and notifications in the headset.
(LIV’s real-time Avatar technology inside VR games Superhot, Blade & Sorcery and Budget Cuts)
In 2022, LIV will release their proprietary all-software based volumetric streaming technology and destination platform 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 enables the capturing of entire worlds and the people that inhabit it, for playback or live consumption by anyone, on any device, opening up an entirely new category of social experiences between fans, creators and gamers.
Dr. Doom, Co-founder & CEO @ LIV comments: “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 also join the board. He shared, “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 livestreaming 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.”
For more information about LIV, please visit https://www.liv.tv/.
About LIV
LIV is on a mission to empower people in VR & AR to capture and share their adventures with their friends, family and fans. Founded by former competitive gamers and streamers, the company is built by creators for creators. With integrations in 50% of the Top100 games and over 13,000 monthly creators, LIV is ushering in a new generation of content creators in VR & AR. Since launching in 2018, LIV’s creators have driven over 3.5bn views to their content.
Find out more about LIV and their open roles by visiting https://liv.tv and by joining their official Discord at http://liv.chat
About BITKRAFT Ventures
BITKRAFT Ventures is a leading investment platform for gaming and Web3 globally, and has been the most active gaming venture capital firm and lead investor in 2020 and 2021, according to research from Invest Game and Drake Star Partners. Founded by industry pioneer Jens Hilgers, BITKRAFT serves a worldwide network that spans many of the industry’s forward-thinking startups and founders—including former executives from the likes of Activision Blizzard, Riot Games, Epic Games, Google, and Apple who are working to build and operate the virtual worlds and economies of the future. BITKRAFT operates five venture funds with a total of over $570M in assets under management and has over 80 companies in its global portfolio as of February 2022.
BITKRAFT’s experienced international team works closely with exceptional entrepreneurs to create significant value through early candid partnerships, unique domain experience, entrepreneurial history, and a global ecosystem of strategic partners.
Find out more about how BITKRAFT and its portfolio companies are pushing the boundaries of Synthetic Reality® by visiting https://www.bitkraft.vc/vision.