Our investment in Condense
The last 24 months have seen the world retreat online. As countries locked up and as borders shut down, people found shelter on the internet. Circumstances forced us into physical hibernation, but in parallel, pushed us to explore new ways of building intimacy on the web. It comes as no surprise that at this time of isolation, we looked for ways to stay connected. After all, the human default is to be social.
It is fair to say that all of this — COVID, lockdowns, WFH — accelerated what was already underway — a tectonic shift from a 2D internet to a 3D one. An internet that is more immersive and human-centric, one that makes you feel presence. For many, time spent scrolling through text and photos was replaced by time spent roaming virtual environments — games, game-like social spaces, VR, etc.
It is no coincidence that as schools shut down, the likes of Roblox and Fortnite saw DAUs surge to the 10s of millions. Kids replaced physical playgrounds with digital ones, while teens replaced malls and cafés with 100-player Battle Royale matches. While screen time soared, socialising persisted. Meanwhile, older crowds went wild for crypto-native virtual worlds, driving the market caps of projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland from millions to billions, as the race to acquire digital land grew fierce. Unity IPO’d to accelerate its mission of building out a 3D interactive future, Epic Games raised funds at a valuation north of $30bn to further progress on its vision of supporting the build-out of the Metaverse, and Facebook rebranded to Meta, solidifying what many of us believed was beginning to happen — eyeballs are morphing into avatars and ad dollars are about to follow.
In less than two years, we went from a world in which 3D experiences were reserved for gamers, to a world in which 3D experiences underpin a growing chunk of our online experience. Games have transformed from being a medium designed purely for entertainment to being a medium designed for entertainment, commerce and social exchange. As Matthew Ball puts it in his Metaverse Primer, “persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds” are where we will spend most of our waking life for play and work. This is materialising quicker than most of us can imagine. It comes as no surprise that a giant like Microsoft has decided to buy Activision Blizzard for close to $70bn or that Sony has decided to buy Bungie for close to $4bn. The next computing interface will be 3D — currently disguised as games.
At LocalGlobe, we have been observing the shift closely. Two things have become clear to us:
1. A 3D internet is inevitable. People want immersion and 3D offers that. To shed some colour: 75% of kids aged 9–12 in the US play Roblox, with the average player clocking >2.6 hours a day. 3D is what they know, it is what they will be accustomed to, and it is what they will expect as they grow older.
2. If people are to spend an increasing part of their waking hours submerged in immersive digital spaces, a new format will be needed to drive/stream content to them.
Adding 1 and 2 together:
as people shift to interacting with the web in 3D, broadcasters, brands and creators will have to find new, native ways of reaching and engaging them. Metaverse properties will need a link to the outside and the outside will need a link in.
Enter Condense, a Bristol-based, startup building the underlying infrastructure to link the physical world to the digital one by enabling anyone to live stream 3D video into digital environments (applications built using Unity, Unreal, ARKit, etc). To put it simply, Condense is a real-time bridge into the Metaverse. Live video infrastructure for 3D spaces.
Imagine watching a live concert or a football match inside a stadium in e.g. Fortnite, Roblox, Rec Room or GTA, either on your computer/console or via VR/AR — that is what Condense enables. If it sounds like science fiction, we do not blame you. The underlying technology here is the byproduct of years of research; the productisation of the latest developments in computer vision and video compression studies. Most excitingly though, it is low-friction plug and play — no pre/post production needed. It is both platform and hardware agnostic, as easy as streaming video to Twitch. And while 3D video — aka volumetric — is not particularly new, 3D video at scale, in real-time certainly is. Condense unlocks a future where content can be streamed to millions of concurrent end-viewers/players across multiple 3D environments at the same time. This will be particularly important as the number of 3D environments on the web grows.
Naturally, we see music and sports (think gigs, festivals, boxing or tennis matches) to be particularly exciting areas for Condense to start out in. There is significant pent-up demand on the end-user side and incredible interest from broadcasters and creators. But in much the same way nobody could have really predicted that Twitch, YouTube or TikTok would be built on the back of traditional video infrastructure, it is very hard to grasp what other use cases Condense will unlock over time. One can squint and start to imagine — immersive education, high-fidelity training, health, digital entertainment, real-time social experiences, etc. We think the opportunities are limitless. And as adoption of 5G accelerates and as LiDAR technology improves, it is not unreasonable to imagine a future where anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection will be able to capture + stream the world around them directly into virtual worlds. The next MrBeast or Charli D’amelio may very well end up building their brand / growing their audience inside of a Roblox, not YouTube or TikTok.
Unsurprisingly to those familiar, Bristol is Condense’s home. A city that uniquely balances counter/pop culture with world-class academia. From Massive Attack, Portishead and the BBC Natural History Unit to leading AI semiconductor maker Graphcore and the UoB, one of the world’s leading computer vision research institutions — all birthed within walking distance of one another. It is no coincidence that a company looking to enable broadcasters and creators to stream content into virtual properties using cutting-edge infrastructure was born here. Bristol’s love for the arts and respect for the sciences makes it a natural place. Which brings us to Nick, Ollie, Dan and Andy, a founding team of four (ex Twitter, UoB Computer Vision Department) with incredible domain expertise in ML, live video infrastructure and broadcasting/media. Truthfully, it is rare to come across a team that so perfectly balances the ingredients needed to build out on such an ambitious vision.
Today, we are incredibly excited to announce that we are partnering with the four of them as they set sail on their journey of building out the video rails for the 3D web. We are thrilled to be leading their Seed round alongside our friends at Concept, 7Percent, Deeptech Labs and Tiny VC, as well as a phenomenal group of angels including Grace Ladoja, Ian Hogarth (Songkick), Tom Blomfield (Monzo), Suli Breaks, Dave Haynes and others.
Here’s to a more immersive web.