Samuel, could you begin by sharing Landvault's founding vision and how this has evolved under your leadership?
The company started in 2018 under the name Admix, with a simple vision: gaming and virtual worlds were going to create entirely new opportunities for brands to reach a new audience in an interactive way. We developed a solution for brands to integrate product placements into any video games, seamlessly. Over the next few years, we managed to raise significant capital (close to $35m) and grow the company, working with some of the largest advertisers: Uber, National Geographic, McDonalds, Coca-Cola. In 2021, many of our clients started to hear about the metaverse and wanted to do more than advertising, but building their own virtual experiences. We saw a big demand for extending our product to create experiences, not just advertising, and acquired the Landvault studio, and built award winning experiences for the likes of Mastercard or Heineken. Going through the bear market and many brands pulling off the metaverse, we had to adapt drastically to find a new segment of consumers. I moved to Dubai to open a new branch of Landvault, focused on the country's metaverse strategy. During our first year, we won contracts with various government entities across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Egypt and Saudi, building digital twins and immersive experiences to promote the country to the rest of the world, all supported by our AI creation product, hosting and monetization technology. Today, our vision is to build the technology to make the 3D internet possible - what we believe is the next evolution of the Internet. We are also working on creating a fairer economy for creators, across all platforms - a web3 platform we just soft launched called Matera and that recently raised $3.6m.
A more detailed story is available here:
https://landvault.io/about-us
Landvault builds technology to power the 3D internet, from AI-assisted creations to helping businesses bring their products to life and creating new revenue channels. Can you discuss some of the groundbreaking technologies or practices that have been pivotal in achieving this and how they align with your overall business strategy?
The technologies have been built to answer local clients' needs. When we opened the Dubai office, we only had monetization technology. We learnt from our first clients here that they needed:
1. a way to build environments faster and cheaper. This is why we build our AI product that can turn images into 3D assets
2. a way to deploy the content on the web, on local servers. This is why we build our Publishing platform
3. a way to measure success and assess ROI - our Analytics platform
4. a way to create economies within their worlds - which is why we build Tokenization via our spin-off Matera
Overall, all product decisions stemmed from understanding customers needs and productizing that. More info about our strategy here:
https://landvault.io/blog/landvault-2-0
Despite advances in AI and high-profile launches like Apple's Vision Pro, the full potential of the 3D internet, or spatial computing, as Apple would phrase it, seems to remain underexplored. From your perspective, why has it been challenging for these technologies to gain mainstream traction compared to AI, and how is Landvault leveraging these technologies to shape future digital experiences?
The 3D internet is not just a technology, it's an entire paradigm shift towards a more immersive, dynamic internet, powered by gaming technologies. AI is a massive catalyst of the 3D internet as it enables much faster creation of 3D interfaces. We see the rollout of the 3D internet as a more seamless rollout, similar to how most mobile apps were focused on photos first, then videos replaced them as the most common media. 3D will be the next step, it won't happen overnight, but many things on the internet can be better done in 3D and Landvault is building the technology stack to make this happen.
As a leader, how do you foster a culture of innovation and collaboration at Landvault, and what impact has this had on your team and business outcomes?
As a CEO with a team over 100 (including our creative / studio team), I find that the best way to inspire the team is to bring them insights directly from the market: what are clients looking for, what are they trying to achieve. I often suggest ideas and frameworks to address these needs, make some introductions, and let the product team figure out a detailed solution. This way we were able to bring great products to market, such as the first MENA-ready metaverse hosting solution for government entities, or a product placement solution for brands to buy ad space across our virtual worlds.
Could you elaborate on some of Landvault's collaborations, such as Lush and Hershey? Which ones stand out to you and why?
Brands have different goals, which are often connected to their marketing objectives, reaching new customers or engaging existing ones. In the case of these 2 brands, we built experiences to engage their superfans and get them to unblock exclusive value, which was very successful with an average time spent in the experience close to 30 minutes, which is unheard of for any other media! Such is the power of the 3D internet.
How do you see your market evolving in the next few years, particularly in Dubai and the Middle East, and how is Landvault preparing to meet these changes?
The market opportunity in MENA is particularly exciting, as we are making a long-term bet on the region and me personally. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have metaverse strategies, with growing budgets to develop the region into a market leader. Coupled with AI and frontier technologies, we believe there will be a growing need to develop these immersive solutions in the region. For the past year, Landvault has localised its platform to service clients across the public and private sectors.
Looking ahead, what are Landvault's long-term goals, and what steps are you taking today to achieve them?
Since its inception, the internet has created an incredible amount of wealth, but this wealth has been aggregated to a handful of large companies. Landvault is building the technology to make the 3D internet possible, from creation, to hosting and monetization. Matera is building the foundation of a fairer creator economy for anyone on the internet, where creators get rewarded for their contribution. So overall, our mission is advancing the state of the internet into a better, fairer, more creative internet for everyone. Every client who trusts us to use our technology today, is a step in the right direction.
