Ready Player Me

Ready Player Me was an Estonian technology company that built a cross-platform avatar system allowing users to create a single personalized 3D avatar and carry it across thousands of games and virtual worlds.¹¹ Founded in 2014 in Tallinn as Wolfprint 3D by Timmu Tõke, Kaspar Tiri, Rainer Selvet, and Haver Järveoja, the company began with hardware 3D scanning booths before pivoting to AI-generated avatars from a single photograph.⁸ By August 2022 the platform was used by more than 3,000 developer partners, and the company had raised $56 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz.² Netflix acquired Ready Player Me in December 2025 for an undisclosed sum, and the company's public services shut down on January 31, 2026.¹

Founding and hardware era

Wolfprint 3D was founded in 2014 by four Estonians who saw an opportunity in the growing virtual reality market after Facebook's acquisition of Oculus.¹⁰ Three of the founders — Tõke, Tiri, and Järveoja — graduated from the Estonian Business School, while Selvet studied computer engineering at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech).¹³ Tõke had started his first business at age 16 and managed a sales team by 17; before co-founding Wolfprint, he ran an Estonian clothing brand.¹⁰ Co-founder Kaspar Tiri told Reuters in 2016 that the company's premise was that "every person needs a unique 3D avatar of themselves for VR to truly become social."⁷

The company's first product was the Luna scanner, a white egg-shaped 3D scanning booth equipped with six cameras and a touch screen that captured a high-resolution scan of a human face in approximately 90 seconds.⁷ Wolfprint installed these booths in shopping malls, airports, conference halls, and a science museum in Helsinki where visitors could place their scanned faces on a virtual astronaut.⁷⁸ In December 2016, the company raised $500,000 through a side-by-side equity crowdfunding campaign on SeedInvest to support further deployment of its scanning pods.¹² By that point Wolfprint had built four Luna booths and scanned over 5,000 individuals.¹²

The hardware business gave Wolfprint a proprietary database of more than 20,000 face scans, which later became the training data for the company's deep-learning avatar-generation system.² In late 2018, the company abandoned physical scanners in favor of software that could generate a 3D avatar from a single two-dimensional photograph, and shortened its name to Wolf3D.⁸ Under the Wolf3D name, the team spent roughly four years building custom avatar systems for enterprise clients including Tencent, Huawei, HTC, Verizon, and H&M.⁴ That enterprise business was cash-flow positive, but Tõke later described it as unsatisfying because each integration was custom-built and siloed — the avatars could not travel between platforms.¹⁰

Platform launch and growth

In mid-2020, Wolf3D launched Ready Player Me as a developer-facing platform with plug-and-play SDKs for Unity, Unreal Engine, and web environments, allowing any game or app to integrate avatar creation in a matter of days rather than months.⁴ Early integration partners included VRChat, the social VR platform, where the Ready Player Me avatar creator generated more than 30,000 personal avatars within its first 24 hours of availability.⁴ In August 2020 the company closed a $1.3 million seed round led by Trind Ventures, with participation from Presto, Koha, Spring Capital, and Contriber.⁹

Adoption accelerated through 2021, growing from 25 developer partners in January to more than 900 by December.⁵ The company rebranded entirely to Ready Player Me to match its primary product.⁵ The platform's name was a deliberate reference to Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One, with "Me" replacing "One" to emphasize that the metaverse should center on the individual player rather than any single controlling entity, according to Tõke.⁴

Fashion and entertainment brands began collaborating with the platform during this period. Ready Player Me partnered with Dior, New Balance, Adidas, Pull&Bear, and Warner Brothers to create cross-game avatar assets such as branded outfits and accessories.²⁵ Electronic music producer Deadmau5 released a "Head5" NFT wearable collection through the platform.⁵

By mid-2022, at the time of the Series B, Ready Player Me reported approximately five million avatars created across more than 3,000 developer partners — triple the partner count from just seven months earlier.² The company's business model centered on revenue sharing: avatar customization assets such as skins and fashion items were sold within partner games, and Ready Player Me took a percentage of each transaction.¹⁰ The company employed about 30 people distributed across 10 countries, with Tõke based at times between Estonia, Los Angeles, and New York.⁴

Funding

Ready Player Me raised approximately $72–77 million across multiple rounds over its lifetime.¹¹¹ The December 2016 crowdfunding on SeedInvest brought in $500,000.¹² By July 2021, cumulative pre-platform fundraising totaled $3.7 million from U.S. and European investors including former Rovio marketer Peter Vesterbacka and Bolt CEO Markus Villig.⁴

The $13 million Series A closed in December 2021, led by Taavet+Sten, a venture fund co-founded by Taavet Hinrikus of Wise and Sten Tamkivi of Teleport.⁵ Other participants included Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub, Samsung Next, NordicNinja VC, and Konvoy Ventures.⁵

The $56 million Series B closed in August 2022, led by Andreessen Horowitz through its gaming-focused funds.² The round's investor list drew from across the gaming and entertainment industries: David Baszucki, co-founder of Roblox; Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch; Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, co-founders of King Games; sports and entertainment company Endeavor; Kevin Hart's Hartbeat Ventures; the D'Amelio family; and venture firms Plural and Konvoy Ventures.² Jonathan Lai, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, described the company as "the largest platform for avatar-systems-as-a-service."²

PlayerZero and Web3

In December 2024, Ready Player Me launched PlayerZero, a consumer-facing gaming platform where players could create, customize, and carry avatars across multiple supported games.⁶ Unlike the developer-oriented Ready Player Me SDK, PlayerZero was built around blockchain-based ownership of digital appearance items, using the Base blockchain created by Coinbase for its NFT infrastructure.⁶

At launch, PlayerZero released "Collection ZERO," an open-mint wearable pack that reached 81,000 NFT mints, with more than 15 games supporting the avatars within the first months.⁶ The platform also introduced a rarity and leveling system: users could evolve their avatars by collecting items across six rarity tiers.⁶ A subsequent premium drop, "Genesis: Limited Edition," featured narrative-driven art built around a Hero and Villain duality.⁶

Tõke framed PlayerZero as the company's answer to growing demand for portable digital identity among younger players, citing a Roblox/Parsons study finding that 40 percent of Gen Z players update their avatars monthly and 84 percent consider digital fashion important to self-expression.⁶ The broader Ready Player Me developer network — more than 4,000 active developers and two million monthly active users at that point — served as the technical foundation for PlayerZero's interoperability layer.⁶

Netflix acquisition

On December 19, 2025, Netflix announced it had acquired Ready Player Me for an undisclosed amount.¹ Netflix said it planned to use the startup's development tools and infrastructure to build avatars that would allow subscribers to carry personas and fandom across the streamer's expanding game library.³ The acquisition came as Netflix shifted its gaming strategy under Alain Tascan, who joined as president of games from Epic Games in mid-2024, toward party games, narrative games, kids' games, and TV-based titles.¹

Approximately 20 Ready Player Me employees joined Netflix, including co-founder and CTO Rainer Selvet.¹ The other three co-founders — Tõke (CEO), Tiri (chief creative officer), and Järveoja (COO) — did not join the company.³ Following the acquisition, all Ready Player Me services, including the online avatar creation tool and PlayerZero, were wound down effective January 31, 2026.¹ Netflix did not provide a timeline for when avatar features would appear in its games.³