BUD, a virtual platform that allows users to create and share 3D interactive content with friends, has raised $36.8 million in its second funding round in three months, led by Sequoia Capital India.
It had raised a $15-million Series A round in February, and with the latest new infusion, BUD’s total financing has reached over $60 million.
The firm said the latest round of funding, which also saw participation from ClearVue Partners, NetEase and Northern Light Venture Capital and existing investors GGV Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Source Code Capital, will be used to develop creation tools, expand the global user base and roll out web3 products for its metaverse ecosystem.
Founded in 2019 by former Snap engineers Risa Feng and Shawn Lin, Singapore-headquartered BUD is a nascent app that offers millions of user-created experiences ranging from hangout places to battle royale games. The firm claims that its easy-to-use creation tool can be used even by someone with no prior coding knowledge.
“While BUD makes 3D content creation possible for mainstream Gen Z consumers, we will continue to bring blockchain to mainstream consumers and allow our creators to truly own and monetise their creations,” Lin said in a statement.
Even though the idea of metaverse has existed for a long time in Marvel movies and video games, Mark Zuckerberg’s move to rename Facebook to ‘Meta’ has brought the concept into the limelight. Milieu Insight released the results of their ‘Metaverse’ study of N=6000 people across Southeast Asia, which revealed that most Southeast Asian countries feel largely positive about the metaverse, with ‘interested’ and ‘excited’ among the top positive emotions voted.
Singapore is seeking to solidify its position as a key player for cryptocurrency-related businesses as financial centres around the world struggle to deal with one of the fastest-growing areas of finance. “We think the best approach is not to clamp down or ban these things,” Monetary Authority of Singapore Managing Director Ravi Menon had said earlier this year.
Startups in this space have stepped up efforts to make the most of this opportunity. Earlier this year, Naver Z, a Naver subsidiary that runs the 3D-avatar app Zepeto, announced the launch of a $100-million fund to promote its plugin powered by Unity, the platform that enables creators to develop 2D and 3D content for mobile phones, PCs or virtual reality devices. Zepeto’s user base has recently exceeded 300 million.
BUD said its users have created over 15 million custom experiences—virtual spaces with gameplay that others can join—since the app launched in November last year. Virtual assets, including costumes and accessories that users design for characters, have changed hands more than 150 million times on BUD’s marketplace.
Perhaps partly due to its free-to-use and ad-free nature, the app has been among the top 10 social apps in nearly 40 countries across North America, Southeast Asia and South America, TechCrunch reported, adding that it is currently the top free social Android app in Thailand and Vietnam according to market intelligence company SensorTower.