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Over time, 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 form 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 network built for communities. Basically, we’re filling in the gap where social video has become the predominant medium of cultural exchange engineering today. About 90% of internet traffic is going to be video this year,” Ananda mentioned.
Social networks like Reddit have carried out effectively with text-focused communities, however Veme is extra like a cross between TikTok and Reddit, the place video meets social neighborhood dialogue.
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“Where is the short form video for communities?” Ananda mentioned.
Origins
Ananda served on the board of the Social Enterprise Circle, a 30-year impression funding group that has stewarded over $250 million in impact-related tasks.
In 2013, Ananda cofounded Unify, a meditation platform to deliver thousands and thousands of individuals collectively in international synchronized meditations for world peace. It has launched greater than 70 international synchronized campaigns and has developed into community with two million subscribers. Some accomplishments have included breaking the Guinness Ebook of World Data title for world’s largest on-line meditation and reaching over 6 billion views in 180 international locations.
At its peak, Unify reached 300 million impressions per 30 days throughout its media ecosystem. Ananda helped deliver collectively luminaries resembling 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 Govt 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 resembling 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 primarily based on pursuits, not simply purely primarily based on form of algorithms.
Making Veme
The corporate has raised $2 million to date in two rounds of token gross sales. The corporate is closing a $2 million enterprise spherical now.
“It’s all about community engagement and retention. Inside your communities, you can create debates, discussion, AMAs. You can have videos, reply to videos. You can play social media, video games. If you’re a fitness influencer, you can post daily challenges to community on who does the best push ups, the best workouts. Everybody can post their content. Not to the global feed, but into their communities.”
The corporate constructed an AI video meme generator. Veme has a decentralized public library with hundreds of clips that individuals can use to instantly create content material and share their views. Customers can combat one another in meme battles utilizing brief kind 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 individuals can kind their very own. If you happen to’re in a cat neighborhood, you may share your personal cat second of the day. You may add your personal clips to a clip library. You may write a immediate for AI to generate a state of affairs and it’ll robotically generate one for you.
“That’s where the name comes from the video meme. We’ve created a video meme generator, and we’re going to continue to build out the technology for that. You can auto generate video memes and turn them into a primary methodology for communication.”
Veme is exploring completely different codecs for video with customers. Leaderboards floor the most well-liked vemes.
To this point, Veme has had good traction. It has bought $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 non-public sale, and it has greater than 40,000 Twitter followers.
The staff contains Duke Jones, CTO; Marchiano Loen, chief product officer; and Sebastian Roberts, COO. Buyers embody Michael Birch, founding father of Bebo Social Community; Ted Area, 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 possible launch in September. 1000’s of customers have used it to date.
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. However it was exhausting to get that on Fb. With video, you may hear somebody’s voice and see that particular person’s face. That’s a lot extra highly effective, Ananda mentioned. That form of suggestions is simple to offer on a platform like Veme, he mentioned. That’s how individuals can turn out to be larger voices inside a neighborhood.
The corporate is presently elevating a $2 million non-public spherical ($37.5M valuation) from traders together with Diode VC, Arcadia Group and Ridgecrest Capital Companions. Different large rivals are already wed to their codecs, so Ananda doesn’t anticipate a lot competitors quickly.
Proper now, individuals touch upon Vemes which can be posted by creating textual content responses. However Ananda mentioned the staff is making an attempt out video threading and different options.
“One thing that we found is that the the most sticky platforms are the ones that actually enable community,” he mentioned. “The good thing about our platform is that our job is to onboard communities, and bring in communities to come use the app and create incentive programs for them to use us. If we do our job right, we’ll get an organic traction to make this really go viral on its own.”
The beta will go stay in June or so.
