Veme is constructed for neighborhood co-creation and social rewards

Through the years, entrepreneur Raamayan Ananda felt like social media platforms weren’t constructed for neighborhood co-creation and incentive alignment. That prompted him to construct Veme as a brand new sort of social community.

It’s a Web3-powered short-form social video community, constructed for communities. Veme makes use of AI instruments to transform textual content into viral, culturally related short-form video memes.

“We’re a social media community constructed for communities. Principally, we’re filling within the hole the place social video has develop into the predominant medium of cultural change engineering right this moment. About 90% of web site visitors goes to be video this 12 months,” Ananda stated.

Social networks like Reddit have finished effectively with text-focused communities, however Veme is extra like a cross between TikTok and Reddit, the place video meets social neighborhood dialogue.

“The place is the quick type video for communities?” Ananda stated.

Origins

Ananda served on the board of the Social Enterprise Circle, a 30-year affect funding group that has stewarded over $250 million in impact-related tasks.

In 2013, Ananda cofounded Unify, a meditation platform to convey hundreds of thousands of individuals collectively in international synchronized meditations for world peace. It has launched greater than 70 international synchronized campaigns and has advanced into community with two million subscribers. Some accomplishments have included breaking the Guinness Guide of World Data title for world’s largest on-line meditation and reaching over 6 billion views in 180 nations.

At its peak, Unify reached 300 million impressions per 30 days throughout its media ecosystem. Ananda helped convey collectively luminaries similar to Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Mooji, Mike Tyson, Russell Model, Prince EA and lots of extra into collective livestreams. Ananda’s household enterprise has developed over $2 billion value of real-estate worldwide, together with Marriott Government Flats, Infinity Towers, W Resort and the Sony Aquaverse Waterpark.

In the meantime, he was an early investor and believer in Bitcoin and Ethereum, and has spoken at conferences worldwide on the way forward for decentralized communities. He labored pre-Bitcoin with financial luminaries similar to Michael Linton to pioneer the way forward for credit score, and is now launching Veme.

The corporate began in 2020 within the midst of the pandemic. Ananda was operating Unify with a Fb neighborhood of two million members. It was getting round 100 million views a month. However the platform had its limitations, holding Unify from reaching its personal customers. Ananda noticed communities are based mostly on pursuits, not simply purely based mostly on sort of algorithms.

Making Veme

The corporate has raised $2 million to this point in two rounds of token gross sales. The corporate is closing a $2 million enterprise spherical now.

“It’s all about neighborhood engagement and retention. Inside your communities, you possibly can create debates, dialogue, AMAs. You’ll be able to have movies, reply to movies. You’ll be able to play social media, video video games. In the event you’re a health influencer, you possibly can put up day by day challenges to neighborhood on who does one of the best push ups, one of the best exercises. All people can put up their content material. To not the worldwide feed, however into their communities.”

The corporate constructed an AI video meme generator. Veme has a decentralized public library with 1000’s of clips that individuals can use to right away create content material and share their views. Customers can struggle one another in meme battles utilizing quick type social video.

Admins or mods of the neighborhood can select prompts for the neighborhood. An AI mannequin can auto generate prompts for neighborhood members or folks can sort their very own. In the event you’re in a cat neighborhood, you possibly can share your personal cat second of the day. You’ll be able to add your personal clips to a clip library. You’ll be able to write a immediate for AI to generate a situation and it’ll mechanically generate one for you.

“That’s the place the title comes from the video meme. We’ve created a video meme generator, and we’re going to proceed to construct out the expertise for that. You’ll be able to auto generate video memes and switch them right into a main methodology for communication.”

Veme is exploring completely different codecs for video with customers. Leaderboards floor the most well-liked vemes.

Up to now, Veme has had good traction. It has offered $1.1 million in non-fungible token gross sales, with $800,000 closed in its first spherical for its seed token. It has raised $1.4 million in a token personal sale, and it has greater than 40,000 Twitter followers.

The crew contains Duke Jones, CTO; Marchiano Loen, chief product officer; and Sebastian Roberts, COO. Traders embrace Michael Birch, founding father of Bebo Social Community; Ted Discipline, founding father of Interscope Data; Charles Wismer of Ledger Leap; Ross Fujii, former CTO at Cisco; and Alex Kelly, cofounder of Casper.

Blockchain is built-in into Veme in a few methods. One is thru decentralized promoting, the place the corporate places promoting into sensible contracts the place it has actual transparency. It splits promoting income with the neighborhood members. It’s like a tipping and rewards system for the neighborhood.

The Veme social platform is in beta testing, and it’ll doubtless launch in September. 1000’s of customers have used it to this point.

At Unify, Ananda labored with Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins and Oprah Winfrey. Every one in every of them treasured listening to voices of their communities. But it surely was exhausting to get that on Fb. With video, you possibly can hear somebody’s voice and see that individual’s face. That’s a lot extra highly effective, Ananda stated. That sort of suggestions is simple to offer on a platform like Veme, he stated. That’s how folks can develop into greater voices inside a neighborhood.

The corporate is presently elevating a $2 million personal spherical ($37.5M valuation) from traders together with Diode VC, Arcadia Group and Ridgecrest Capital Companions. Different huge rivals are already wed to their codecs, so Ananda doesn’t count on a lot competitors quickly.

Proper now, folks touch upon Vemes which can be posted by creating textual content responses. However Ananda stated the crew is making an attempt out video threading and different options.

“One factor that we discovered is that the probably the most sticky platforms are those that truly allow neighborhood,” he stated. “The advantage of our platform is that our job is to onboard communities, and usher in communities to return use the app and create incentive applications for them to make use of us. If we do our job proper, we’ll get an natural traction to make this actually go viral by itself.”

The beta will go stay in June or so.