DNABLOCK develops REPLIKANT, a flagship technology that lets distributed teams produce bespoke, high-quality digital 3D avatars, videos, games and even cinema-quality productions. The company focuses on tooling for creator communities in the decentralized Web3 medium. With this funding DNABLOCK plans to further scale and deploy REPLIKANT and empower key partners and creator communities to bring characters to life. The company will also establish an LA-based creator studio to launch new NFT talent and hire several key leadership roles. Leadership is led by co-founder and CEO Anthony Kelani and co-founder and CTO Luc Shurgers, with Scott Broock joining as Chief Strategy Officer following the round. Financially, DNABLOCK closed a second seed round of $7M to support these initiatives. DNABlock provides a virtual production platform called Replikant that uses a photo-to-avatar AI pipeline to turn a selfie into a customizable 3D avatar in about 40 seconds. Creators can fully customize characters from a library of clothing and props, render cinematic animated videos, and create multiplayer venues for live events that can be streamed. The platform also supports distribution of original content and avatar assets as NFTs and includes a private Discord community for creators. DNABlock has produced projects for clients including Fox, Apple TV+, video games, music labels, fashion designers, and award shows. The company was bootstrapped by cofounders Anthony Kelani and Luc Schurgers, who began work on the tech in 2017 and incorporated in 2019; it currently has 11 employees. DNABlock plans to use the new funding to bring the technology to a broader community of individual creators and companies on its waitlist later this year.

Total raised

$8M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Mar 2022