PHL Inno's weekly "Startup Spotlight" feature highlights founders and new businesses cropping up in the region.
The startup: Anima helps artists develop and sell their augmented reality non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, on blockchain.
Augmented reality interacts with real-world elements using digital visual technologies like smartphones to enhance the physical world. NFTs exist as one-of-a-kind digital art that can be bought or sold, with records of each transaction logged on a blockchain.
Founded: January 2021
Home base: Newtown
Founders: Alex Herrity and Neil Voss, a product developer and creative director, respectively. They started their careers in gaming – Herrity at Epic Games and Voss at Nintendo. When they realized that people who play video games are used to owning and sharing virtual goods within video games, such as Fortnite skins or Animal Crossing items, the duo created Anima.
“You can't take them out of those games, but they’re as real to people as physical goods,” Herrity said. “It's like a way to express yourself. It's a part of you. It's a way to trade and sell things.”
The product: Anima is one part studio, one part art dealer.
The company partners with artists and creators to turn their works into augmented reality pieces that can only be seen through a digital camera. Anima then helps them sell those augmented reality works.
The startup has already had three shows, working with artists like Michael Kagan, Lyle Owerko, Stargate and Demsky. With Michael Kagan, a painter, Anima helped him build an augmented reality version of a sculpture he had done physically.
It can be difficult to create art for AR because it requires real-time 3D rendering that needs to be seen from every angle, similar to a video game, Herrity said. Anima wants to showcase what technology can bring to art in augmented reality in terms of interactivity for creators and users.
“We want to be the ones who are sparking and enabling creator-driven augmented reality,” he said.
Anima lets buyers see and interact with the art before purchasing it with a credit card or cryptocurrencies. Buyers then receive a “virtual object,” or NFT, with their name on the certificate, along with the edition number and the artist’s name.
The NFT, which can be sold on other such marketplaces, can be scaled, moved and placed using augmented reality and viewed by multiple users at one time. Artists are also at liberty to change the NFT, Herrity said.
“They're not like static 3D objects that don't change. They can change based off of where you place them, based off of future activities by you or the artists,” he said. “They're interactive.”
Funding: Anima raised a $500,000 pre-seed round in March from a group of investors including Coinbase Ventures, NFT collective Flamingo and angel investors.
The goal: Anima wants to open up the idea of owning NFTs beyond crypto converts, Herrity said.
“Instead, we're trying to make this a bit more mainstream for people that are already kind of into the idea of owning something virtual and interacting with it, but maybe aren't crypto enthusiasts,” he said.
The startup has sales lined up with auction house Christie’s and other venues over the next year, Herrity said.
Anima does revenue splits with artists and has sold one of Kagan’s pieces for $180,888, Herrity said. He declined to share the startup’s revenue, but said that it aims to be profitable in 2021.
It currently has a team of five employees, with plans to hire more developers, 3D artists and a content community manager.
Going forward, Anima wants to be less involved in the creation of augmented reality works and to focus more on developing tools for artists to use to make their own works in augmented reality, Herrity said.
