Virbe - Virtual Beings for Metaverse and Autonomous Shopping

Virbe is an award-winning Virtual Being creation suite licensed as Technology-as-a-Service. The suite allows for transforming ConversationalAI and chatbots into interactive 3D human-like avatars with natural voice and conversation capabilities. Virtual Beings, or Virbes, can work 24/7 as virtual hosts or assistants on any website, mobile app, or in a physical location (e.g. kiosks). They are perfect for an autonomous customer experience, HR activities, e-commerce upsell and cross-sell and are innate in the Metaverse.

TaaS revenue stream (Early access): We have recently launched Early access to our SaaS platform and onboarded 30 testers. We currently have 1 paying partner provider, who is using our service to build solutions for their customers. We make money from licences sold for each Virbe they integrate. Enterprise stream: We have developed 6 projects for SME and generated revenue of over 30 000 EUR. Currently we have more than 5 projects in pipeline with value over 150 000 EUR.

Our platform is directed at digital product creators: corporate innovation departments, product companies, as well as marketing agencies, and even individual contributors, like developers and designers. We also work with medium & large enterprises working on end-to-end solutions in Retail, E-commerce, Hospitality and HR.
Virtual Beings are in the same sector as chatbots, and this particular market is currently worth 2.6B USD and has a CAGR of 30%.
The global digital human avatar market size was USD 10.03 Billion in 2020. It is expected to reach USD 527.58 Billion in 2030.

The number of autonomous shops online & offline is steadily increasing. McKinsey reports that the retail industry bears the greatest potential to create value by autonomous technologies and AI, amounting to over USD 600 billion annually. But, replacing human social interactions with chatbots has negative effects on customer satisfaction and brand performance. Chatbots are cumbersome, text-based only, and lack human-like interaction. Fact: clients retain 10% of the message when reading text in a chat box as compared to 95% of retention when they watch it in a video.

Virbe is an offline & online customer experience with interactive Virtual Beings licensed as Technology-as-a-Service. Virtual beings, or Virbes, are 3D beings, which are brought to life by our AI Engine, state-of-the-art voice and conversation capabilities, as well as contextual gestures and emotions. They automate what’s best in human communication in the digital space. They have their own personality and are able to hold meaningful and natural conversations in any language. They can tell your story and showcase products, wining customers by humanising the over-digitised customer service.

Our competition in Virtual Being creation are companies like Uneeq, Soul Machines, Quantum Capture, Rapport, Animatico, but none of them provide a solution that is scalable and affordable enough to serve hundreds of thousands of customers at the same time. What's more, our technology can be easily integrated into the existing web, mobile and desktop products. We deliver both interactive 3D models and voice & text conversation capabilities (NLP, speech-to-text & text-to-speech) all packed into one, plug & play product.

- the most versatile integrations on the market e.g. ReadyPlayerMe integration allowing for super quick implementation of your uniquely personalised Virtual Being on the web or in an app.
- Super quick and easy script writing option for Presenter Mode.

Revenues:
Our business relies on creating and hosting virtual beings in our hub on our servers. In our monthly plan you receive access to the hub, the possibility to customise your own virtual being and deploy it anywhere you want.

- HUB licence for Conversational and Presenter Mode products
We charge per virtual being (minimum 100 EUR/month). In the monthly plan you have 10000 interactions included. Afterwards we charge you 0,02 EUR per interaction.
- custom pricing for enterprise projects (starting from 20 000 EUR)
- we expect MRR of 200 000 EUR/month by the end of 2024

Costs:
- we plan to grow our team to 23 people in 2023 which will be a cost of 100 000 Eur/month which is the main cost to the company (mainly development and sales)

Virbe is a TaaS platform. Our business strategy is based on two main ideas. Firstly we plan to attract partners (eg. product agencies, chatbot designers) that are going to sell our technology to their existing customer clients. We are expanding through marketing activities aimed at growing the Virbe community of creators (Discord, Social Media, educational events e.g.webinars). Second part of our strategy is to develop custom projects for large corporate clients that will help us to build our brand visibility and provide a steady cash flow.

In Nov’21 we closed a 1 100 000 PLN seed round with LTCapital, and due to rapid growth, we plan to raise a supplementary round of app. 1 500 000 EUR in Q2/Q3`22. It will be used to expand our product team from 8 to 20 people until the end of this year and establish the office in western Europe. We will also streamline our sales processes, consolidate our white-label products portfolio, and educate the market about Virtual Beings and relevant use cases through events and hackathons - this is how we want to build a strong global presence.

As an investor, you will be offered a convertible debt agreement. Our plan is to give a 10% conversion discount on the valuation, which will be set during Series A (Expected close date Q2/Q3`2023). If you want to become a lead investor we are able to negotiate different terms.

There are a few risks for our business:
1. The market might not be ready for such a solution - we are the only one in Poland and one out of few in the world that sell Virtual Beings solutions. The highest boom for our product might begin in 1-2 years. We have to be ready at that time.
2. Crisis - our solution is not essential for companies in times of crisis. It might boost sales and help to reduce the cost of customer support but it's not a deal-breaker (yet).
3. Lack of investment - at the moment we have to scale to foreign markets and put maximum effort into sales and product development. Without highly skilled sales team - which is costly - we won't be able to grow.
Lack of investment.

We're one of 3 finalists of the Startup Programme by the XIV European Economic Congress;
We are one of 6 finalists of the “Żabka Future Lab Startup Programme” ;
We have accomplished a Scaleway Growth Stage Startup Program;

We’ve received funding from PARP (Polish Agency for Enterprise Development) - POPW.01.01.02-06-0028/19WNIP;

The winner of 2022 Laval Virtual Annual Event in France in the VR/AR Worlds category;

Second place in Unicorn Battle for Central and Eastern Europe 2022;

We have won a Hackathon for a banking Institution;