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Graveyard

Soul Machines
On February 5, 2026, Leon Bowker and Luke Norman of KPMG New Zealand were appointed receivers of Soul Machines Limited after the company lost key enterprise customers and exhausted its capital. Despite raising more than US$135 million (about NZ$225m) over its life, the company reportedly had only around US$12 million left and was found to owe at least NZ$19.6 million, including amounts to secured and unsecured creditors and to staff owed wages. The receivership followed an earlier attempted sale; KPMG said the company could no longer provide its normal services and that it would continue the existing process to find a buyer for the business and assets. Co-founders Mark Sagar and Greg Cross had already exited the slimmed-down company before the collapse, marking the end of one of the digital-human category's most visible pioneers as an independent operating business.
Obituary
Ready Player Me
Netflix announced its acquisition of Ready Player Me on December 19, 2025, taking on the roughly 20-person team to power cross-game avatars across Netflix's gaming titles. The public Ready Player Me avatar service, including PlayerZero, was shut down on January 31, 2026, ending its role as neutral, interoperable avatar infrastructure for third parties. Thousands of games, social apps, and metaverse platforms (notably VRChat integrations) that had relied on Ready Player Me avatars lost their backend overnight and had to migrate to alternatives such as Genies. Although the technology lives on inside Netflix, the independent company and its open service ceased to exist, making it a defunct platform from the perspective of the ecosystem it once served.
Obituary
Union Avatars
Union Avatars — the brand of Barcelona company Linking Realities S.L., founded 2020 by Cai Felip and Jordi Conejero — appears to have quietly wound down in the second half of 2025. After raising roughly €1.2M in 2022 and a small CDTI/Inveready round in October 2024 (about $1.6M total), and remaining active through mid-2025 (its Spanish registry filed capital increases as late as June 2025), its entire public footprint went dark: the founder's and company's social activity stopped around early 2025, and by November 2025 the unionavatars.com domain had lapsed to a registrar parking page, where it remained through mid-2026. No acquisition and no formal dissolution or insolvency (concurso de acreedores) filing surfaced — consistent with a small seed-stage startup that ran out of runway and shut down its selfie-to-3D-avatar SDK business without a documented liquidation.
Obituary
Brud
In October 2021, Dapper Labs acquired Brud — the Los Angeles studio behind virtual influencer Lil Miquela — in an all-equity deal and used it to launch a new unit, the 'Dapper Collective,' led by Brud CEO Trevor McFedries, focused on helping communities build DAOs on the Flow blockchain. Brud's team and IP (including Lil Miquela) were folded into Dapper Labs, ending Brud's existence as an independent creative studio. The acquisition was part of Dapper Labs' push into decentralized, community-owned media, repositioning the pioneering virtual-influencer brand inside a Web3 company rather than a standalone agency.
Obituary