Metaverse-Based Social Platform BUD Bags $15M in A+ Round Financing

Global metaverse-based social platform BUD announced its completion of an A+ round of financing totaling $15 million, Chinese media outlet 36Kr reported on Monday. This round of financing was led by Qiming Venture Partners, followed by Source Code Capital, GGV Capital and Sky9 Capital. MM Capital served as the exclusive financial consultant for this financing round. The funds will be mainly used for overseas business research and growth.

Founded in 2019, BUD is a user generated content (UGC)-oriented social media platform, allowing users to create personalized 3D interactive content using codeless tools. Its target user base is the global generation Z.

BUD is seeking to expand the scope of social media platforms, based on the immersive experience of the metaverse, UGC, 3D content, social trends, fashion and creativity – all of which are more easily accepted by generation Z.

Risa, co-founder of BUD, said: “We are looking forward to using games, AI, virtual characters, and non-player characters (NPC) on the BUD platform when our technology is more mature, because our philosophy is to let every user have the opportunity to create dreamy 3D scenes and continuously lower the threshold for users to build a metaverse world through technological innovation.”

The founding team of BUD comes from Snapchat, Facebook and other companies based in Silicon Valley. At present, the company has nearly 100 employees and is expected to expand to 200 in 2022. Shawn, another co-founder of BUD, said: “In the future, a global center will be set up in Singapore, and there will be localized operations and development teams in the core areas of globalization.”

According to data published by industry analyst App Annie, the overseas version of BUD for the iOS platform was officially launched on November 5, 2021, and the Google Play version was launched on October 30, 2021. Within one month after BUD’s global release, it ranked among the top five social applications in the App Store in many countries including the United States, and has continued to grow rapidly in the past few months.

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Regarding future plans and how to deal with challenges, Shawn said: “In the short to medium term, BUD will focus on user growth and product polishing first. Only by lowering the threshold of creation and improving the quality of content can users be retained. Therefore, the continuous iteration of the core editor will always be the focus of our work.”