Genies, which develops avatars for virtual identity and digital goods, raises $65M Series B led by Bond and plans a marketplace on Dapper Labs' Flow service
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Genies began as a consumer app: after raising $15M at a $100M+ valuation it launched an iOS product that turned personal avatars into news reenactments, backed by roughly 680,000 waitlisted signups (Genies' 2017 iOS avatar launch). The Series B marks the pivot from avatar-as-app to avatar-as-commerce — a marketplace for virtual identity and digital goods built on Dapper Labs' Flow.
The choice of rail matters as much as the check: Flow is Dapper Labs' purpose-built NFT blockchain, which had already raised $18M in a token sale (Flow's token sale) and now gains a flagship avatar-and-goods marketplace as an anchor application. A year later, the thesis was validated when Genies raised $150M led by Silver Lake at a $1B valuation (Silver Lake's $1B valuation round), bringing total funding to $250M.
First-order effects
- Bond's $65M funds the build-out of Genies' marketplace on Flow, moving the company from a free consumer avatar app to monetizing digital-goods transactions tied to its avatars.
- Dapper Labs gets a marquee non-game application for Flow, extending the chain beyond its CryptoKitties origins into virtual identity and wearables.
Second-order effects
- Mythical Games' $75M round for 'playable NFTs' — player-owned avatars bought and sold on its platform (Mythical Games' playable-NFT platform round) — shows the same investor thesis funding competing avatar-ownership rails weeks apart, pushing each toward exclusive content and creator lock-in.
- Other avatar makers face pressure to pick a blockchain home and open their own marketplaces, since user-generated digital goods only accrue value where they can be traded.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, avatar companies stop being app developers and become marketplace operators — identity rendered once, then monetized through tradable goods on a chosen chain — a structure Silver Lake's later $1B bet on Genies endorsed.
- Consumer blockchain adoption may increasingly run through avatar and gaming marketplaces rather than financial speculation, making companies like Dapper Labs infrastructure landlords whose chains compete on which consumer apps anchor them.
The trend: Avatar startups are evolving from consumer apps into blockchain-based marketplaces for player-owned digital goods, with venture capital racing to fund the rails.