Union Avatars

Union Avatars is a capital-efficient specialist in a problem that keeps regenerating demand: portable 3D identity. The Barcelona company (founded 2020 by Cai Felip and Jordi Conejero) turns a single selfie into a realistic, riggable 3D avatar via API and SDK, with Unity and Unreal integrations, a GLB-to-VRM converter bridging the game-engine and VTuber/social-VR format worlds, and a UnionID identity layer aimed at letting one avatar travel across platforms. The thesis outlived the metaverse hype that birthed it because the underlying need did: games, social VR, virtual events, retail try-on, and now embodied AI agents all need fast, cheap, user-resembling avatars, and very few independent vendors survive to serve them — the category's poster child, Ready Player Me, retrenched after its 2023 splurge, thinning the field for the remaining interoperability specialists. Union Avatars has been repeatedly validated by institutional selection processes rather than hype: the 2022 €1.2M round led by Inveready and Fi Group with Outlier Ventures and GoHub, an October 2024 seed extension backed by Inveready, FCR, and Spain's CDTI INNVIERTE program, plus ACCIÓ deep-tech co-investment — public-private diligence that keeps a sub-10-person team funded through the trough. Positioning in Barcelona's XR cluster (4YFN, MWC's NEXR program) gives it European enterprise reach without Silicon Valley burn rates. The option value is real: if EU digital-identity regulation, the VTuber economy, or avatar-native AI agents inflect, a tiny company owning a working selfie-to-avatar pipeline and identity rails becomes a strategic tuck-in at a multiple of its trivial invested capital.