Hyper raises $3.6M from Amazon and more for its iPhone-based, VTuber-friendly avatar platform

VTubers online personalities who use motion-capture-powered manga- and anime-inspired avatars to interact with the world alongside games, over YouTube, and in other places have become big business, with the most popular of them collectively racking up hundreds of millions of hours of viewership in a month, along with loyal fan bases, lucrative sponsorships and demand for more.Now, it appears that big tech is starting to take some notice. That is just a sliver of the number of gaming streamers active in the market today 15 million on Twitch with an audience of around 1 billion users annually let alone the tens of millions of creators running channels on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and so many other places on the long tail new media horizon.But Hyper by replacing a typically fussy set-up of motion capture suits, costly computer and camera equipment and software and bandwidth overhead with a much lighter approach of just an iPhone and an app believes it can crack open a new seam of demand for making and using VTuber-style avatars on these platforms.We want to be the largest avatar company in the world, and we think we could do it, Aaron Ng, Hypers CEO and founder, said in an interview.San Francisco-based Hyper was incubated at Y Combinator as part of its Winter 21 cohort, and it is using this latest funding both to continue building out its existing business, as well as to work on new products based around its avatar technology.First up in that plan will be a move into avatar AI assistants.Its newest feature is Hyper AI, a tool to create AI-based characters that might look just like Hypers other VTuber avatars, but are actually entirely based on AI. Were not coupled to any of them.If VTuber avatars are all about creating narratives for fans, then this is the next logical step in that process, Ng added.We see this as a new world of storytelling where people can interact with these characters, he said. Its a strategic fund that at its core places bets on emerging areas of technology that in themselves can have future relevance; in our case mostly for our devices business, or our media business.Whether that will mean integrating Hypers tools into Twitch, or using its tech to build characters based on content IP that Amazon owns, to use it elsewhere on Amazons platforms, or something else entirely, you can see where Hyper might appeal.One clue into what Amazon might have in mind here might be found in another startup in the Alexa Fund portfolio, the synthetic influencer platform Superplastic: The plan there is to build out a wider media empire around some of Superplastics characters. That might also be a route that Amazon could pursue with Hyper.We are primarily excited to work with Amazon due to the large amount of IP that it has, Ng said.Meanwhile, developments like the launch of Apples Vision Pro headset are bound to change the goalposts again when it comes to what consumers expect out of digital interaction, opening the door to more possibilities for companies creating digitally native content and the tools to build more of it.Hyper Online has the potential to accelerate and expand the content creation landscape, said Dan Abelon, Partner at Two Sigma Ventures, in a statement.