The Metaverse Known as Digital Village Secures Funding
The upcoming metaverse known as Digital Village has secured $2 million in its pre-seed funding round.
Expected to launch in the second quarter of 2022, the Digital Village blends gaming, social media and e-commerce, allowing a person’s virtual twin to move and interact in virtual spaces, and share experiences and assets across digital platforms.
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Investors include Venrex, a venture capital firm who has previously backed firms such as Revolut, Lyst and Charlotte Tilbury; The Venture Reality Fund, whose portfolio includes such metaverse and virtual reality companies as Wave and Rec Room; M6, and NOIA Capital.
“These actors will support the Digital Village on its mission to build a more ethical, massively adaptable and seamless metaverse,” the American start-up said in a statement provided first to WWD.
Evelyn Mora, the Paris-based tech entrepreneur and sustainability guru behind Helsinki Fashion Week, is leading the Digital Village project, promising an alternative online world where avatars can own or rent land, test out sustainable construction methods, visit digital stores and museums, trade digital fashions and artworks, and even mount ad campaigns.
Mora has described it as “a space for culture and socially conscious co-creation where the digital and physical merge; where limits and boundaries between the real world and the virtual are blurred.”
It is being built with Unreal Engine 4, a gaming technology, on the principles of digital sustainability and with recycled digital assets.
According to Mora, the Digital Village has implemented crypto-currency and fiat methods to provide stability in relation to assets, NFTs and blockchain technologies.
“It aims to take the metaverse lifestyle and economy to the masses. The DV marketplace is blockchain agnostic and currently supports Ethereum and Vechain through its village protocol interface,” she said in a statement.
The Digital Village made its debut in a smaller incarnation in 2020, when it hosted what was billed as the world’s first 3D fashion week, attracting more than 700,000 visitors.
The purpose of Digital Village “is to become a welcoming ecosystem that allows everyone to create in Web3 and integrate their digital assets and lifestyles seamlessly and ethically into the metaverse,” Mora noted in a release. “The DV aims to build a metaverse platform with ethical methods at its core, with human-centric design, thinking about the impact on its members as well as the impact this new environment and lifestyle will have on culture, art, fashion and sustainability.”
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