• Lighthouse Labs, a metaverse search engine, raised $7 million in a seed round co-led by BlockTower, Animoca Brands & Accel.
  • Lighthouse aims to enable users to search for places, events and friends across and within virtual worlds.
  • Check out the 13-page pitch deck used to raise the funds within five months of launching.

Jump into any of the virtual worlds that make up the metaverse right now and it’s a daunting experience, even for crypto savvy users.

The metaverse is expected to offer the next iteration of the internet where individuals will work, play and socialize in immersive virtual worlds, instead of exploring a collection of 2D webpages.

Many of the virtual worlds, such the space-focused Star Atlas or big brand favorite The Sandbox, are accessible to early adopters. The challenge is that many of the worlds are still in the beginning phases meaning the user experience can be fraught with glitches and fragmentation.

Crypto startup Lighthouse Labs just raised $7 million in a seed round co-led by Animoca Brands, BlockTower and Accel to solve this problem.

Founded by Jonathan Brun and Justine Massicotte in January 2022, Lighthouse aims to allow users to search for places, events, experiences and friends within one virtual world and across others, making the metaverse easier to navigate.

“If you are curious about the metaverse and don’t know where to start, Lighthouse will be the place to go,” Brun, who is the CEO of Lighthouse, said in a press release.

“By building Lighthouse, we take the view that siloed worlds will eventually merge to become closer to the web,” he added. “We’ve all seen how much standards and principles of openness propelled our digital lives with the internet. We are confident that Web3 virtual worlds will unite behind our vision of making the open metaverse a searchable place.”

Lighthouse aims to launch its beta product this summer, which will provide users with search, recommendation and social features. It lined up a number of partnerships with decentralized virtual worlds for the beta release, Brun said in an email.

“The Sandbox’s founders are investors through Sparkle Ventures (they are GPs) and Animoca Brands is one of the co-lead of our round, which gives us great access to their ecosystem,” he said.

This is Lighthouse’s first fundraising round and it has occurred within five months of formally launching the startup. The company declined to disclose the current valuation based on the seed round.

Other investors in the round include White Star Capital, The Graph core developers and Tiny VC as well as a number of crypto founders, such as Ryan Selkis, who founded Messari and Alex Svanevik, who founded Nansen.

“As a long-time builder and supporter of the open metaverse, Animoca Brands is well aware of Lighthouse’s overall value proposition and in particular of the pain points that the company is working to solve,” said Yat Siu, the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, in a press statement.

“We believe that Jonathan and Justine have the right vision and expertise to execute and we look forward to providing our assistance as they expand the universe of worlds they partner with,” he added.

Brun’s background is in investing having previously worked as a venture capitalist for White Star Capital’s digital assets and technology funds, while Massicotte previously led the search and query function for Coveo, a publicly-traded enterprise search company.

“The open metaverse is still early, which gives us the opportunity to work hand in hand with projects to deploy standards that will ensure that the spatial web forms a cohesive unit”, said Massicotte, who’s Lighthouse’s chief technology officer, in a press statement.

Check out the 13-slide pitch deck used to raise $7 million to build out the Lighthouse vision.

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