Online e-commerce retail giant Amazon’s venture capital arm Alexa Fund leads a $20 million Series A-4 investment round for the 3D character studio Superplastic, which also inked a first-look deal to make it easier to produce more TV shows and movies with characters from the Superplastic universe.
According to the announcement, Craft Ventures, Google Ventures, Galaxy Digital, Kering, Sony Japan, Scribble Ventures, Kakao, Animoca Brands, Day One Ventures, and Betaworks were the other investors.
“This latest round brings Superplastic’s total funding to $58 million to date and supports the expansion of the Superplastic character universe,” the announcement notes.
Superplastic founder and CEO Paul Budnitz stated “The new collaborative partnership with Amazon Studios reaches a massive audience and provides a new playground for us to wreak havoc worldwide. We’re grateful for the investment the Amazon Alexa Fund gave us to help us continue to grow the Superplastic Universe!”
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The agreement was conditional on Superplastic maintaining control over its characters and other intellectual property, which many Hollywood bidders had previously been unwilling to do, according to Budnitz.
The Superplastic synthetic celebrities Janky and Guggimon will appear in the Amazon Studios production “The Janky & Guggimon Show”. The Janky & Guggimon Show chronicles the antics of two slacker and utterly inept best friends who are hell-bent on becoming rich and famous but leave a path of anarchy and ruin in their wake.
Synthetic celebrities Janky and Guggimon from Superplastic amassed a sizable social media following before securing a first-look agreement with a popular streaming service.
If picked up for a full season, it will be streamable on Amazon Prime Video in more than 240 nations and territories. The episodes of Janky & Guggimon will last a regular 22 minutes and present brief stories that “need to arc into something longer.”
Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund, added “Superplastic’s virtual celebrities delight audiences and meet their customers where they are, and we see them as demonstrative of a new class of IP that is going to be increasingly relevant with younger generations.”
Last month, it was revealed that Amazon is reportedly launching an NFT project – digital assets enterprise. The giant is reportedly teaming up with layer-1 blockchains, blockchain-based gaming startups and developers, and digital asset exchanges for this initiative.
