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 finished 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 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 developed into community with two million subscribers. Some accomplishments have included breaking the Guinness E book of World Information 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 thirty days throughout its media ecosystem. Ananda helped convey collectively luminaries corresponding 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 Govt Residences, Infinity Towers, W Lodge 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 corresponding 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 form of algorithms.
Making Veme
The corporate has raised $2 million thus far 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 folks can use to right away create content material and share their views. Customers can battle one another in meme battles utilizing brief 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 individuals can kind their very own. In the event you’re in a cat neighborhood, you’ll be able to share your individual cat second of the day. You’ll be able to add your individual clips to a clip library. You’ll be able to write a immediate for AI to generate a state of affairs and it’ll mechanically 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 preferred vemes.
To this point, 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 workforce consists of Duke Jones, CTO; Marchiano Loen, chief product officer; and Sebastian Roberts, COO. Buyers embrace Michael Birch, founding father of Bebo Social Community; Ted Area, founding father of Interscope Information; 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. Hundreds of customers have used it thus far.
At Unify, Ananda labored with Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins and Oprah Winfrey. Every one in all them treasured listening to voices of their communities. But it surely was exhausting to get that on Fb. With video, you’ll be able to hear somebody’s voice and see that individual’s face. That’s a lot extra highly effective, Ananda mentioned. That form of suggestions is straightforward to present on a platform like Veme, he mentioned. That’s how individuals can change into larger voices inside a neighborhood.
The corporate is at present elevating a $2 million personal spherical ($37.5M valuation) from buyers together with Diode VC, Arcadia Group and Ridgecrest Capital Companions. Different huge rivals are already wed to their codecs, so Ananda doesn’t anticipate a lot competitors quickly.
Proper now, individuals touch upon Vemes which might be posted by creating textual content responses. However Ananda mentioned the workforce 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 reside in June or so.