Liv has raised $8.5 million for its platform that enables augmented reality and virtual reality content creators to record and live stream within their favorite games and apps.

Bitkraft Ventures led the round with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Amazon Alexa Fund, Credo Ventures, Samsung Next, and Olive Tree Capital. Angel investors also participated, including Maveron partner Dave Wu. The funding will be used to invest in a creator and developer fund and grow the team, with the company actively hiring in engineering, design, operations, marketing and community management.

Liv wants to revolutionize the VR streaming and content consumption experience by allowing creators to share their adventures within VR and AR games with their fans in real time, either as themselves (commonly known as mixed reality or MRC) or as your favorite avatar (commonly known as Vtubing).

VR app developers integrate Liv’s software development kit (SDK) to unlock a suite of capture tools and technologies for their users, generating video content for their apps. Since 2018, the creators of Liv have generated more than 3.5 billion views of their content. Dr. Doom began the work in 2016 and founded the company in 2017.

AJ “Dr. Doom” Shewki, co-founder and CEO of Liv, spoke to me in an interview about the early days.

“Back then, this wasn’t supposed to be a company, since we were hosting a show on Twitch,” Dr. Doom said. “We had gotten our hands on some of the first VR headsets. And I have experience in competitive games. So the idea was that I was going to host a show on Twitch, and we would show what we thought VR esports would look like when people like me played it really competitively.” The streaming, recording, and streaming experience was interrupted. A basic problem is that if you as a viewer see exactly what the VR streamer is seeing, you get sick very quickly as the point of view movements are jarring and unexpected.”

Then he showed me a demo. He put on his virtual Dr. Doom costume and then entered a virtual reality demo. In the demo on Discord, I was able to see what he was doing through the stream he provided. I was able to see him interact with various objects in a virtual space and then he touched a special object. That immediately started a video recording of one of his VR adventures. He shared his demo with me at 30 frames per second on Discord.

It seemed like a great way to convey what you’re doing in the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels like snow crash Y ready player one.

Dr. Doom said that Liv supports more than half of the top 100 VR games with more than 2,200 developers on the platform and has 13,000 monthly active creators generating more than 30,000 hours of content each month.

The technology works live without the need for post-production. Creators can film their real bodies within their favorite VR game or transform into a custom avatar that supports full body tracking, finger tracking, eye animation, and lip tracking, as well as a full stack of utilities for viewing the stream. chat, alerts and notifications on the headset.

In 2022, Liv will launch its proprietary software-based volumetric streaming technology and destination platform that enables creators and fans to connect in ways that are unique to space technologies, building on what makes VR and AR special: the feel. of presence.

It enables entire worlds and the people who inhabit them to be captured, played back or consumed live by anyone, on any device, opening up a whole new category of social experiences between fans, creators and gamers.

“We have been on a mission to empower creators in VR and AR to share their adventures with their friends, family and fans since 2016,” said Dr. Doom. “As former competitive gamers and VR streamers, we know what we want and need from the streaming and streaming experience, and we set out to solve our own problems. This increase allows us to bring on board top-tier investors and strategic partners that will help us get closer to our goal of having Liv exist in every headset and game.”

Jens Hilgers, Founding General Partner of Bitkraft Ventures, will also join the board.

“Liv is ushering in an entirely new content sharing format that allows users and creators to capture their VR/AR gameplay, stream it to an audience, and interact in ways unique to space technologies,” Hilgers said in a statement. “Since its launch in 2018, Liv has become the leading app for streaming AR and VR games, with a large and growing community of creators and support for more than half of the top 30 VR games. . We believe VR and AR will introduce a distinct new platform for content creation, and the VR natives behind Liv are leading the way.”

“Usually people will say this makes them nauseous and it’s a really bad experience,” Dr. Doom said.

The other problem for VR desktop streaming is that you have a big screen in front of you that you can’t see from inside the VR scene. If you stream from inside VR to the flat screen that a viewer can see, the viewer only gets a limited view of what the VR streamer actually sees. And that is not a good experience. Lastly, it’s a problem if you’re the VR streamer and you can’t insert yourself into a scene you’re recording.

What Liv does is figure out how to shoot a scene. She sets up the equivalent of a camera in the corner and then records what the streamer is doing across a room from a third-person perspective. For the past five years, Liv has been working on fixing all of these issues, so it’s easy to record something that others can see from a third-person perspective. Liv can also record facial expressions and project them onto the avatar in the third-person scene.

“We give you as much expressiveness as you want in a creator,” said Dr. Doom. “You can add waist, knee, foot, shoulder, mouth, and eye trackers—as many trackers as you like to increase the expressiveness of your avatar.”

You can also easily switch avatars in real time. You can take selfies in the virtual reality scene. Dr. Doom said that he thinks of some of the 3D scene recordings as a kind of memory palace, where someone visualizes things to more easily remember them.

“Memory palace is a legitimate memory technique where you model a physical space in your head and then assign memories to different objects in the space,” he said. “Because it’s easier for us to assign thoughts spatially to features rather than abstract thoughts themselves.”

The team has around 13 people and will use the money to hire more people.

Liv-based videos are taking off on platforms like TikTok, though Dr. Doom said we’re in a nascent space with primitive tools.

“I think that’s just a function of time in the market. We’ve been working on this for five years and we look forward to continuing to work on this for the next five years and continue to build value to create this,” said Dr. Doom.