VRChat Partners with Anthos Capital to Close $80M Series D
Tags: Vrchat, Press Release, Social Vr, Virtual Reality, Venture Capital

VRChat works with many partners and communities to build amazing events that are extremely immersive and highly social, including virtual conferences, marketplaces, concerts and more. We’re always on the look out for strong event partners and communities to host events with.

However, not all events in VRChat require our involvement! Our innovative community creates and runs endless events of all kinds and at all scales. Music festivals like MUZZfest bring in world-acclaimed DJs and artists to show to thousands of attendees. Regular events like GHOSTCLUB, SHELTER, Loner Online, and dozens upon dozens of others set and raise the bar repeatedly for immersive virtual reality experiences.

Every Sunday, the Community Meetup and VRChat Prefabs walks through worlds and projects in VRChat that members are working on, giving feedback, testing, and collaboratively building.

There’s also a wide variety of enthusiast conventions that occur in VRChat. Some are directly VRChat related like avatar builder conventions, while others showcase work from the panelists like music, games, comics, or other art. Of course, some of our community’s conventions are just for hanging out with people with common interests!

As we grow, we will continue to work with event partners that mesh well with the VRChat community, and encourage anyone interested to run events for anything they’re passionate about. The upcoming Groups system will also help with setting up and attending events.

Avatars

One of the most important aspects of VRChat is your custom avatar. You can create one yourself, or you can find one that fits you best. By finding an avatar pedestal, you can interact with it to become a robot, zombie, alien, anime character, or anything you can think of!

If you can’t find something that fits your persona, you can create an avatar yourself. Either make one from scratch using software like Blender, use an avatar creator from one of our partners like Tafi or Wolf3D, or purchase one directly from a creator.

Our state-of-the-art avatar systems enable expression in meaningful and emotional ways that our community loves. We empower artists, performers, musicians, dancers, puppeteers, comedians, coders, shader wizards, actors, filmmakers and more to create and share their art with the world.

Our Avatar 3.0 system offers unmatched customization, expression, and customizability to make your avatar work exactly how you want it to. Both newbie and experienced avatar creators can craft amazing avatars for themselves and their friends.

This investment will expedite our efforts to expand our avatar system, allowing avatars to interact with each other in new and exciting ways, like “boop”-ing your friend on the nose and having hearts pop out, or bonking them on the head for a classic spinning stars effect. This will breathe new life into having fun creating and using avatars.

Growing our Connected Communities

The VRChat team maintains close connections across our global community using various tools like our Discord, our Feedback boards, our forums, VRChat itself, and more. Our platform is heavily driven by community input, and keeping these connections open allows us to adapt and learn as VRChat continues to grow.

We recently introduced Regions, which is a way for players in different parts of the world to play VRChat with improved ping and latency. As part of our continued growth plan, we will be working towards localization for our international communities.

“We are building a new social system called ‘Groups’ that will let our community self-organize around anything they want. This will enable wider growth across VRChat as people find or create a Group to connect with others that share interests and activities.” - Charles Tupper, Community Manager

VRChat is a fertile environment for top content creators on Twitch and YouTube. VRChat has over two and a half million followers on Twitch, where community streamers stream adventures, roleplay, content creation, talk shows, nightclub DJs, and more.

We maintain one of the largest Discord communities, with nearly 200,000 users. In addition, there are thousands of VRChat communities that use Discord to collaborate and plan their adventures.

Always Something New

You only have to open the VRChat “Worlds” menu to find thousands of places to discover and explore, filled with people to explore them with. Every day, there are hundreds of brand new worlds uploaded to VRChat, ready to be discovered.

This deluge of new content can be overwhelming. Our new investment allows us to accelerate efforts to improve the experience for both creators and explorers. We are working on a reimagined UI and supporting systems to facilitate better search and discovery of content. This will make it easier for users to find the things they enjoy, as well as step into brand-new experiences they’ve never had. These improvements are part of the path towards the creator-driven economy and continued growth.

Using the VRChat SDK, our community has created a vast array of interactive worlds: social games, secluded hangout spots, quiet bars, busy nightclubs, scary escape rooms, complex puzzles and mysteries, drawing and painting rooms, performance stages, racing tracks, jetpack testing grounds, mind-blowing audio-visual experiences, photorealistic locations, mountainsides to climb, treehouses standing in the middle of a vast field of fractal environments — and a lot more that defy explanation. No matter what you’re looking for, there’s a world for you. Like what you see? You can save that world as a favorite or make it your home.

VRChat also contains hundreds and hundreds of avatar worlds. Here, you can find thousands of avatars to browse through and try on, often following themes reflecting popular culture. Put on a new look and check out your fresh identity in a mirror.

The Power of Udon