Veme is built for community co-creation and social rewards

For years, entrepreneur Raamayan Ananda felt that social media platforms weren’t constructed for group co-creation and incentive alignment. This prompted him to create Veme as a brand new form of social community.

It is a Web3-based short-form social video community constructed for communities. Veme makes use of synthetic intelligence instruments to show textual content into viral quick video memes that relate to tradition.

“We’re a social community constructed for communities. In essence, we’re filling a niche the place social video has develop into the popular medium of cultural trade right this moment. About 90% of web site visitors can be video this yr,” Ananda stated.

Social networks like Reddit work nicely with text-based communities, however Veme is extra like a cross between TikTok and Reddit, the place video meets social group dialogue.

“The place’s the quick group video?” Ananda stated.

Origins

Ananda served on the board of administrators of Social Enterprise Circle, a 30-year-old enterprise capital group that has dedicated greater than $250 million to affect initiatives.

In 2013, Ananda co-founded Unify, a meditation platform to unite hundreds of thousands of individuals in international synchronized meditations for world peace. He launched greater than 70 international sync campaigns and grew right into a community with two million subscribers. Some achievements embrace breaking the Guinness Guide of World Data title for the world’s largest on-line meditation and reaching over 6 billion views in 180 international locations.

At its peak, Unify achieved 300 million month-to-month impressions throughout its media ecosystem. Ananda has helped deliver collectively luminaries comparable to Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Muji, Mike Tyson, Russell Model, Prince EA and lots of extra for shared reside streams. Ananda’s household enterprise has developed greater than $2 billion value of properties worldwide, together with the Marriott Government Suites, Infinity Towers, the W Lodge and Sony’s Aquaverse water park.

In the meantime, he was an early investor and proponent of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and has spoken at conferences around the globe on the way forward for decentralized communities. He labored pre-Bitcoin with cash luminaries like Michael Linton on constructing the way forward for credit score and is now operating Veme.

The corporate launched in 2020 within the midst of a pandemic. Ananda ran Unify with a Fb group of two million. It was getting about 100 million views a month. However the platform had its limitations, which prevented Unify from accessing its personal customers. The communities Ananda observes are primarily based on pursuits, not just a few algorithms.

Creating Veme

To date, the corporate has raised $2 million in two rounds of token gross sales. The corporate is at present closing a $2 million enterprise capital spherical.

“It is all about attracting and retaining the group. Inside your communities, you may create debates, discussions, AMAs. You’ll be able to have movies, reply to movies. You’ll be able to play social media, video video games. When you’re into health, you may publish every day challenges to the group about who’s doing one of the best push-ups and one of the best exercises. Anybody can publish their very own content material. To not the worldwide feed, however to their communities.”

The corporate created an AI video meme generator. Veme has a decentralized public library of hundreds of clips that folks can use to immediately create content material and share their views. Customers can compete towards one another in meme battles utilizing a brief social video.

Neighborhood admins or mods can select suggestions for the group. An AI mannequin can routinely generate suggestions for group members, or individuals can enter their very own. When you’re within the cat group, you may share your individual second of the day. You’ll be able to add your individual clips to the clip library. You’ll be able to write a immediate for the AI ​​to generate a script and it’ll routinely generate it for you.

“Therefore the identify comes from a video meme. We created a video meme generator and can proceed to develop the expertise for it. You’ll be able to routinely create video memes and switch them into your main communication methodology.”

Veme explores completely different video codecs with customers. Leaderboards present the most well-liked memes.

To date, Veme has had good traction. It has offered $1.1 million in non-fungible token gross sales, with $800,000 closed within the first spherical for its launch token. It raised $1.4 million in a non-public token sale and has over 40,000 followers on Twitter.

The workforce consists of Duke Jones, CTO; Marciano Loen, Chief Product Officer; and Sebastian Roberts, Chief Working Officer. Buyers embrace Michael Birch, founding father of the social community Bebo; Ted Subject, founding father of Interscope Data; Charles Wismer of Ledger Leap; Ross Fujii, former Cisco CTO; and Alex Kelly, co-founder of Casper.

Blockchain is built-in into Veme in a number of methods. One is decentralized promoting, the place an organization places advertisements into good contracts the place it has actual transparency. It shares promoting income with group members. It is like a tipping and reward system for the group.

Veme’s social platform is in beta testing and is prone to launch in September. Hundreds of customers have used it thus far.

At Unify, Ananda labored with Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins and Oprah Winfrey. Every of them appreciated listening to the voices of their communities. However it was onerous to get on Fb. With video, you may hear somebody’s voice and see that particular person’s face. It is rather more highly effective, Ananda stated. That form of suggestions is simple to provide on a platform like Veme, he stated. Here is how individuals can develop into stronger voices locally.

The corporate is at present elevating $2 million in non-public funding ($37.5 million valuation) from buyers together with Diode VC, Arcadia Group, and Ridgecrest Capital Companions. Different main opponents have already familiarized themselves with their codecs, so Ananda does not anticipate a lot competitors anytime quickly.

Individuals now touch upon Vemes which might be posted by creating textual content responses. However Ananda stated the workforce is testing video streaming and different options.

“One factor we have discovered is that the stickiest platforms are those that basically allow group,” he stated. “The advantage of our platform is that our job is to have interaction communities, get communities to make use of the app, and create incentive applications for them to make use of it. If we do our job proper, we’ll get the natural traction in order that it actually goes viral by itself.”

The beta model will go reside round June.