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Geeiq, a metaverse data intelligence company used by Gucci, Ralph Lauren, L’Oréal, Tommy Hilfiger and Karlie Kloss, has raised $8.2 million in a series A funding round. The London-based startup, pronounced “Geek”, provides insights into the return on investment (ROI) of investments in virtual worlds and digital goods.
Geeiq, which has about 30 employees, will use its new investment to hire new talent, expand geographically (including in the US) and develop proprietary relationships with leading platforms. Geeiq recently appointed Michel Cassius as chair, who previously worked at Apple, gaming company Electronic Arts and Microsoft Xbox.
The round was led by YFM Equity Partners, which specialises in business-to-business software startups, with participation from GFR Fund, which has invested in a number of gaming startups, and FOV Ventures, which invests in metaverse-based startups. Helen Villiers, investment director of YFM, says that “exciting market dynamics” provide a compelling reason for investing in Geeiq.
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Global gaming revenue is expected to reach $312 billion in 2027, and advertising revenue is projected to nearly double to $100 billion in 2025, according to a June report from PwC. “People are spending more time gaming, so brands are directing advertising spend there. They need Geeiq to understand the market, data and return on investment of their advertising spend,” Villiers says.
Geeiq was founded in 2018 to provide a subscription-based platform for data on games, pulled from publicly available information, including details such as the ages, genders, incomes and brand affinities among games’ fans. It’s since evolved into a metaverse insights company, providing higher-tier memberships for brands. The package offered by Geeiq includes consultancy, introductions to developers and creators, and custom data insights on how digital items are sold and how to structure strategies on platforms such as Roblox, Zepeto, Decentraland and Fortnite.
Geeiq is among a new class of startups offering tools to brands expanding into the metaverse and Web3, but it is uniquely positioned in terms of its data-based insights for brands. Charles Hambro, founder and CEO (named as one of Vogue Business’s top innovators in 2023), compares Geeiq’s offering to the Nielsen ratings for television viewership in the US and Brandwatch for social media management. “When we started Geeiq — before the word ‘metaverse’ was a thing — we realised that these games are a communication vertical and environment where people are socialising and hanging out,” he says.
Since then, Geeiq has worked closely with brands on a number of projects, forming particular expertise in Roblox and close relationships with Roblox creators. Gucci’s first-of-its-kind Gucci Garden pop-up in Roblox in 2020 established a new arena for luxury fashion, winning the brand a Webby award and prompting a much cited viral tweet from investor and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian highlighting the comparative value of a digital Gucci Dionysus bag over a physical one. Tommy Hilfiger’s standout event at New York Fashion Week in 2022 combined a live fashion show with a simultaneous Roblox broadcast, while a project with Elton John and Universal Music on a virtual Roblox concert and experience became the highest-rated concert in Roblox history.
Measuring digital fashion
How far can Geeiq go? The company has “strong growth and momentum backed up by metrics and an ever-growing blue-chip customer base”, claims YFM’s Villiers. It’s also developed expertise in measuring the impact of digital fashion, which is seen as having an outsized impact on the success of metaverse technologies. For example, Geeiq analysis determined that during the second Metaverse Fashion Week on Decentraland, Adidas’s free NFT coat was a standout success, and showed why. It explained why Nars’s Roblox experience was more successful than that of Nike. It knows that Zepeto’s followers are 13 times more likely to follow brands including Prada, Gucci, Fendi and Balenciaga compared to followers of other games.
This comes at a time when metaverse and Web3 mania has dampened down and brands have a need for new KPIs (key performance indicators, or measures of success), says Hambro. “As these teams start to mature, the KPIs and results on which they are judged become less about innovation and more about traditional marketing metrics,” he explains. Now, brands are not content with just recording how many visits an experience attracts. What do those visitors do, what do they buy, who are they — and are they accomplishing a brand’s goals? “That is what we are trying to solve,” Hambro says. “We are mapping out a fragmented space with lots of options for brands and pulling together information to make a clear map.”
In the current levelling-off period – a “metaverse winter”, as Forrester has dubbed it — the measurement of levels of hype is no longer enough. This has enabled Geeiq to stand out among other startups and companies with less measurable traction. That’s somewhat ironic as, during the hype cycle, Geeiq might have raised more during a funding round. “We would have raised too much on too ridiculous of a valuation, and it would have been difficult, post-hype cycle, to follow through with,” Hambro admits. “So I’m quite glad we are raising at this moment.”
The emphasis now in the digital space is less on hype and more on practical tools, with recent programmes aiming to make digital goods and spaces more desirable to consumers — and more profitable to brands. Last autumn, Farfetch’s Dream Assembly Base Camp accelerator programme fully focused on Web3 fashion startups that improved digital fashion and virtual experiences; winning applicants were dedicated to improving customer use cases and underlying infrastructure. Digital fashion startup Syky, on the heels of a $10.5 million fundraise, began an incubator to help aspiring digital fashion designers grow more mature businesses.
Even non-fashion metaverse companies are backing fashion links because of the potential value they bring. Avatar company Genies, valued at $1 billion, is paying $500,000 to creators who make digital fashion for its platform. Genies founder and CEO Akash Nigam told Vogue Business: “Fashion, you could argue, is more important in a digital world, and specifically with this type of identity, than even in a physical world. We’re indexing hard on fashion because we feel like that’s a really good hook to bring people into falling in love with this identity.”
Going forward, Geeiq is ready to expand beyond the traditional definition of gaming to include areas such as augmented reality experiences and the usage of digital goods in video conferencing platforms, paving the way for AR glasses and more. “Geeiq is very much about what is happening now,” Hambro says. “This investment allows us to be ready for the next wave.”
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