Virtual platform Gather has announced that it has closed a $50 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia and Index. The round also included participation from Dylan Field (CEO of Figma), Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures (Chairman and former CEO of LinkedIn), and Y Combinator.
Gather was founded in May of 2020 in response to the pandemic and previously raised $26 million in its Series A round this past March. The platform offers a virtual environment reminiscent of retro video games where users can create small avatars with which to explore the world and video chat with the people they meet. Since its launch, it has been used by teams as a virtual office, for different types of professional conferences, and by friends and families for social gatherings.
In a blog post announcing the funding, Gather CEO and Co-Founder Phillip Wang shared his inclusive vision for the metaverse and its potential for connecting people from all corners of the globe. “Many more people will have access to opportunity, as work and educational opportunities in the Metaverse will be open to anyone, no matter where they are,” he said. “People will have more meaningful interactions with those they care the most about, as the Metaverse becomes a rich world with experiences to share together.”
In a departure from what some other companies have been highlighting as they work on building out the metaverse, he notes that to the Gather team, the metaverse is not about “virtual reality or gaming or NFTs on the blockchain, though there will be aspects of each.” He focuses instead on how people will interact with each other and the spaces they will create.
With investment continuing to flow to event tech offerings and companies like Facebook/Meta doubling down on the metaverse, the development of this new virtual world has been kicked into high gear. There will likely be a growing disparity between how more ethical startups like Gather and tech giants like Meta — which has already faced a lot of public scrutiny and controversy over its policies — approach this new technology.
Wang even noted in his post that Gather wasn’t started as a business, as he and his team “wanted to make sure we built with the right incentives, and we weren't sure this was best done by a for-profit company, which couldn’t be farther from mindset of Meta and its closest competitors. Time will tell whether the metaverse ends up “shaped by the collective good rather than by a few powerful corporations,” as Wang and the Gather team are hoping and working for.