Founded by Tong Pow and Hongzi Mao just seven months ago, Hologram Labs raised $6.5 million in seed funding to allow people to use NFT avatars in video calls. The San Francisco-based startup wants to make NFT avatars possible across the most common video call programs.
Polychain Capital led the investment round, which was also backed by Nascent, Inflection, The Operating Group, Quantstamp, Neon DAO, Foothill Ventures, and South Park Commons. Linkin Park’s co-founder Michael Kenji Shinoda also stood out as one of the angel investors of the project.
Related: Animoca Brands completes a capital raise of $75 million for an open metaverse
With Hologram, you can use NFTs you own on Google Meet, Discord web, Slack web, Microsoft Teams, and Gather —and in the near future on a number of other platforms—, your avatar will follow your head, your eyes, and even lips, much like how VTubers avatars do on live streams.
Tech Crunch’s Rita Liao interviewed Tong Pow, one of the two founders of the company, and she says Pow was using his “medieval-helmet-clad” cat avatar the entire time. Pow explains why using live avatars on video calls wasn’t a thing till recently by saying “Think of it as a machine learning model compressed and deployed to the browser. The technology has only been achievable in the last few years, with the speed and efficiency to run in real-time.”
The co-founder further explains their project with the following words:
“To create motion-tracked characters, it requires either high-cost hardware for in-depth tracking or certain platforms that do not have the best user experience, so our angle is really creating the tooling and application for users to become virtual characters with one click”
You can actually check out the live NFT avatars on Hologram’s official website, but don’t expect the avatars to show complex human emotions and facial expressions, at least not yet. You’ll need to connect your wallet with Hologram, and the company assures you they won’t overwrite permissions or manipulate your asset.
Hologram wants to help individual creators and brands to create unique identities in the metaverse, and they plan to use the latest investment on improving their platform.
