Montreal-based Lighthouse Labs announced on May 11 that it had secured funding of C$9.1M to build a search engine for the metaverse. The company will use the funds raised to expand its team, expand its partnerships with virtual worlds and continue the development of its platform, which is scheduled to launch in the summer of 2022.
This seed round of financing was led by Accel, BlockTower and Animoca Brands. It includes participation from White Star Capital, Sparkle Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, The Graph core developers StreamingFast, Tiny VC and angels including Patricio Worthalter (founder, POAP), Ryan Selkis (founder, Messari), Alex Svanevik (founder, Nansen), Thibault Launay (founder, Exclusible) and other high profile Web3 investors.
The metaverse is growing rapidly, and some of the biggest virtual worlds like The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Otherside sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land. In order to meet growing user demand and take advantage of a market expected by Grand View Research to reach US$850 billion by 2030, many virtual worlds have recently been created. With more than 50 worlds available today, the number of visitors to the metaverse increases rapidly, which causes significant challenges for users and creators who find themselves ill-equipped to choose which world to explore and develop, said Lighthouse.
Founded by Jonathan Brun and Justine Massicotte, Lighthouse seeks to solve this problem by simplifying discovery and mobility across the spatial web. Its platform, which will launch this summer, will enable users to search for places, events, creators, experiences, and even friends across and within virtual worlds.
“If you are curious about the metaverse and don’t know where to start, Lighthouse will be the place to go”, said Jonathan Brun, CEO of Lighthouse. “By building Lighthouse, we take the view that siloed worlds will eventually merge to become closer to the web.”
Beyond search, Lighthouse will offer a portal where users will be able to see trending activities, build groups of friends to explore the metaverse, see where their NFTs are usable and follow the work of specific brands and creators.
