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Over the years, entrepreneur Raamayan Ananda felt that social media platforms were not built for community co-creation and incentive alignment. That was the reason for him to start building put down as a new kind of social network.
It's a Web3-powered short-form video social network built for communities. Veme uses AI tools to turn text into viral, culturally relevant short video memes.
“We are a social media network built for communities. In short, we are filling the gap where social video has become the main medium for cultural exchange today. About 90% of internet traffic this year will be video,” Ananda said.
Social networks like Reddit have done well with text-based communities, but Veme is more like a cross between TikTok and Reddit, where video and discussion converge in the social community.
“Where is the short video for communities?” Ananda said.
Origin
Ananda served on the board of the Social Venture Circle, a 30-year-old impact investing organization that has managed more than $250 million in impact-related projects.
In 2013, Ananda co-founded Unify, a meditation platform that brings millions of people together in global synchronized meditations for world peace. It has launched more than 70 global synchronized campaigns and grown into a network with two million subscribers. Some achievements include breaking the Guinness Book of World Records title for the world's largest online meditation and reaching more than 6 billion views in 180 countries.
At its peak, Unify reached 300 million impressions per month across its entire media ecosystem. Ananda helped bring together greats like Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Mooji, Mike Tyson, Russell Brand, Prince EA and many more in collective livestreams. Ananda's family business has developed more than $2 billion in real estate worldwide, including Marriott Executive Apartments, Infinity Towers, W Hotel and the Sony Aquaverse Waterpark.
Meanwhile, he was an early investor and proponent of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and has spoken at conferences around the world about the future of decentralized communities. Before Bitcoin, he worked with monetary greats like Michael Linton to pioneer the future of credit, and is now launching Veme.
The company started in 2020 in the middle of the pandemic. Ananda ran Unify with a Facebook community of two million members. It was viewed approximately 100 million times per month. But the platform had its limitations, preventing Unify from reaching its own users. Ananda observed that communities are based on interests, and not just purely on algorithms.
Make Veme
The company has raised $2 million in two rounds of token sales so far. The company is now closing a $2 million investment round.
“It's all about community engagement and retention. Within your communities you can create debates, discussions and AMAs. You can have videos and comment on videos. You can play social media and video games. If you're a fitness influencer, you can post daily challenges in the community about who's doing the best push-ups and the best workouts. Anyone can post their content. Not for global food, but for their communities.”
The company built an AI video meme generator. Veme has a decentralized public library with thousands of clips that people can use to instantly create content and share their opinions. Users can fight each other in meme battles using short social video.
Community administrators or mods can choose prompts for the community. An AI model can automatically generate prompts for community members, or people can type their own prompts. If you are a member of a cat community, you can share your own cat moment of the day. You can add your own clips to a clip library. You can write a prompt for AI to generate a scenario and it will automatically generate one for you.
“That's where the name of the video meme comes from. We created a video meme generator and we're continuing to build out the technology for it. You can automatically generate video memes and turn them into a primary method of communication.”
Veme is exploring different formats for video together with users. Leaderboards show the most popular fights.
So far, Veme has had good traction. It has sold $1.1 million in non-fungible token sales, closing $800,000 in the first round for its starting token. It has raised $1.4 million in a token private sale and has more than 40,000 Twitter followers.
The team includes Duke Jones, CTO; Marchiano Loen, head of product development; and Sebastian Roberts, COO. Investors include Michael Birch, founder of Bebo Social Network; Ted Field, founder of Interscope Records; Charles Wismer of Ledger Leap; Ross Fujii, former CTO at Cisco; and Alex Kelly, co-founder of Casper.
Blockchain is integrated into Veme in a number of ways. One is through decentralized advertising, where the company places advertising in smart contracts where it has real transparency. It distributes advertising revenue to community members. It's kind of a community tipping and reward system.
The Veme social platform is in beta testing and is likely to be launched in September. Thousands of users have used it so far.
At Unify, Ananda worked with Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins and Oprah Winfrey. Each of them cherished hearing voices in their community. But it was difficult to get that on Facebook. With video you can hear someone's voice and see that person's face. That's so much more powerful, Ananda said. That kind of feedback is easy to provide on a platform like Veme, he said. This way, people can become a bigger voice within a community.
The company is currently raising a $2 million ($37.5 million) private round from investors including Diode VC, Arcadia Group and Ridgecrest Capital Partners. Other major rivals have already married their formats, so Ananda doesn't expect much competition anytime soon.
Right now, people comment on Vemes posts by making text comments. But Ananda said the team is trying video threading and other solutions.
“One thing we've found is that the stickiest platforms are the ones that actually enable community,” he said. “The good thing about our platform is that our job is to attract communities and get communities to start using the app and create incentive programs so they can use us. If we do our job right, we will have an organic momentum to make this really go viral on its own.”
The beta will go live in approximately June.