Futureverse co-founders launch $50M venture fund

Shara Senderoff and Aaron McDonald, co-founders of artificial intelligence and metaverse company Futureverse, have launched a new $50 million venture fund and studio.

According to an Aug. 3 announcement, the fund is dubbed “Born Ready” and will invest in emerging technology ventures possessing collaboration potential with either Futureverse or metaverse blockchain The Root Network. The co-founders say Born Ready has already invested in firms such as FCTRY Lab, Power’d Digital, Polemos and Walker Labs.

Senderoff previously founded Raised in Space, a blockchain venture fund that has invested in over 20 crypto startups. McDonald was the co-founder and managing director of NetX Fund, with investments in more than 60 portfolio companies. 

The firm says it plans to roll out an accelerator program in the near future. Futureverse previously raised $54 million in a Series A round led by 10T Holdings and with contributions from Ripple Labs. The raise saw the consolidation of 11 metaverse companies into one ecosystem. Developers said the funds would be used to build the Futureverse platform The Root Network, a blockchain dedicated to creating metaverse decentralized applications. 

The same day, Cointelegraph reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and its metaverse subsidiary Reality Labs surpassed $40 billion in losses as of the second quarter of 2023. Nevertheless, the Meta CEO remains adamant that the future is “all going to be smart glasses” and our time spent on digital devices will become “more immersive and look something more like VR.”

Meanwhile, Web3 and crypto venture capital funding has fallen 79% year-over-year to $779 million across 62 deals in June. Almost all of the new funding went to blockchain infrastructure projects, compared with less than $2.5 million allocated to nonfungible token projects. 

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