Participated · Equity · Jul 2019

LIV builds livestreaming tools that let creators broadcast from within augmented and virtual reality experiences. The company’s core product focuses on enabling in‑VR/AR live content creation and distribution. In April 2023 LIV closed an $8.5M funding round led by Bitkraft Ventures. Other disclosed investors include Sony Innovation Fund, Amazon Alexa Fund, Samsung Next and Goal Venture Partners, alongside additional unnamed participants. The financing is the primary financial detail disclosed in the article; no revenue, user metrics, founding year, or location are provided. Further product roadmaps or use-of-proceeds specifics were not reported in the article. LIV builds a mixed-reality live streaming platform designed to show players' bodies and interactions inside VR so 2D audiences can better understand gameplay. The product integrates with hundreds of VR games and supports thousands of VR streamers, driving over 1.5 billion views since its April 2018 launch. The company connects game developers, streamers and audiences and seeks to create shared hybrid experiences where audiences play an integral role in a streamer's success. LIV plans upcoming releases that add dynamic lighting, progression systems and other features as the LIV Play platform evolves toward a massive-scale MMO for live gaming spectator-ship. The team — founded in 2016 by AJ Shewki (Dr Doom), Steffan “Ruu” Donal and others — is composed of ex-competitive gamers, Twitch streamers and game developers. Recent funding will be used to expand the development team, accelerate streaming technology and integrate additional third-party game studios. LIV builds tools that make VR gaming more interactive and watchable by enabling mixed-reality capture (MRC) that places a live video or 3D avatar of the player inside the game stream. Developers integrate the LIV SDK and content creators use the LIV App, which supports Unity, Unreal and custom engines and brings native VR utilities like stream chat, alerts, scene and camera controls via a proprietary 3D overlay. The company says it supports hundreds of games and “hundreds if not thousands” of avatars, including the VRM format. LIV is positioning itself to evolve into a real-time audience interaction platform and is developing "LIV Play", targeting a closed alpha by the end of the year to let viewers influence gameplay in real time. The team reported experiments with Beat Saber that drove revenue-per-minute increases (700% early, settling to about 300% over 120 days), which underpins its monetisation thesis. Founded in 2016 and based in Prague, LIV raised $1 million from a group of investors including Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Jaroslav Beck, Seedcamp, Techstars, Credo Ventures, VIVE and Splitverse.