Didimo’s digital clones come to games, stores and the metaverse

Didimo is announcing a successful Series A funding round worth $7.15 million. The company makes high quality digital avatars, but the trick is they aren’t made from scratch. Didimo’s unique method boils the avatar creation process down to just 60 seconds. Armilar Venture Partners led the funding round, while Bright Pixel Capital, Portugal Ventures and Techstars also participated.

3D avatar creation is normally lots of work. The more accuracy and complexity required, the longer it usually takes. Didimo’s proprietary cloud-based platform is significantly more cost and time effective for customers. Instead of days, Didimo pulls it off in about a minute.

“Didimo’s mission has always been to make the digital world more human by bringing the richness of emotional expression and personalization to experiences,” said Didimo boss Verónica Orvalho, in a statement to GamesBeat. “We can empower people to do naturally in digital spaces what they do in the real world, like try on clothes, pick up and explore products, compete in a game or entertain their friends. Our technology means people engage with computing in more human and authentic ways.”

On the customer side, the process is pretty simple. All it takes is a high-quality headshot. Didimo’s AI and computer graphics pipeline scans the photo and churns out a fully 3D, realistic and animatable digital counterpart.

Right now it’s limited to just heads and faces. Full bodies are on the way, and that $7.15 million is definitely going to help. But honestly, the faces are the important part. Companies like NOS Communications, Ceek, Soleil Game Studios, Sony and many more are already onboard.

Part of the reason is that Didimo isn’t just sculpting heads. The platform easily generates NPCs and other realistic characters quickly. The tech enables developers to populate their own games with high quality characters.