Genies Builds Engineering Team With Ex-Snapchat Employees
Virtual avatar company Genies wants to be the go-to option for online personas and it's targeting the wealth of talent and seasoned executives from the area's biggest tech firm, Snap Inc., to help make that goal a reality.
Genies' latest hire from the Venice-based social camera company is George "YJ" Tu, a former senior engineer who worked on its Snapchat app and Spectacles camera glasses. Prior to working at Snap, Tu worked for three and a half years as a senior engineer at Facebook and specialized in developing the company's mobile infrastructure.
Tu joins Genies as its director of engineering. Genies CEO and founder Akash Nigam told dot.LA Tu's main mandate is hiring engineers to continue developing its avatar creation platform and digital marketplace, where users can buy and sell digital collectibles and wearable items for their virtual selves.
Tu is the first engineering executive the company's hired since its launch in 2017, but it plans to devote a big chunk of its recent $65 million Series B raise to attracting new talent.
"I think we've landed quite a few Snap employees for a few reasons," Nigam said. "Genies and Snap are probably the two biggest social companies on the Westside in LA, so I think that's an attraction for people that are already local."
The company already has some big celebrity names using its tech to make and share avatars -- including Justin Bieber, Rihanna and hip-hop tycoons Migos -- and the next step is to bring in more users.
George "YJ" Tu is Genies' new director of engineering.
Nigam said the company's hired close to 30 new employees in the last three months, with about 80% of those hires being engineers. He added that roughly 90 people work at Genies, and estimated that 10% of them are ex-Snap employees.
"I think from a product perspective, we share a lot of philosophies and we're very similar in the way that we scheme and we game plan. Snap always is kind of shooting a few years in advance specifically within the social category."
Matt Sibka, Genies' vice president of recruiting, spent three and a half years at Snap creating a team for its CEO Evan Spiegel and was hired to do the same at Genies earlier this year. Genies competes with Snap's Bitmoji avatars, which got a 3D upgrade this July.
"Eighty percent of new spend after our fundraise, and anything moving forward for the next two years, is all going to be on engineering to become an engineering powerhouse," Nigam said. Genies has raised $110 million to date and Nigam previously told dot.LA the company wants to make "Ninety nine point nine percent of its revenue from selling digital goods.
Nigam said that the synergy between Genies and Snap wasn't a conscious choice, but noted that both companies have a similar vision – to advance augmented reality and encourage people to adopt virtual avatars that they can increasingly use as an extension of how they express themselves online.
Nigam's plan is to integrate Genies avatars into as many applications as possible. Currently the company has a deal with Facebook's Giphy that will let users bring their avatar with them to platforms where Giphy is integrated, like Facebook, TikTok or Snapchat – but Nigam said it wants to bring its avatars to popular games like "Roblox" too.
"That's the first API partnership, but we want to have hundreds of those," Nigam said. "So all of a sudden if you get ported into 'Roblox,' you can get any avatar."
Genies' next big goal is getting Generation Z to buy into the NFT hype by creating unique items for their avatars and then trading them. Genies is working with Dapper Labs, which operates NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, two of the most popular NFT exchanges, to create its own blockchain-based system for creating, verifying and selling digital goods.
Genies plans to make the marketplace available by the end of this year. Right now it's only accessible to celebrities, but Nigam said it'll open a beta version to customers by year's end.
"It almost becomes like a login authentication button, where you can port your Genie and your digital goods associated with it from one environment to the next, and in that case, we're kind of creating a new digital identity layer," Nigam said.
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Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash
"We're not playing this as just a deposit game," said chief executive and co-founder Derek Merrill. "[There is] a real need for an insurer tech platform for not just rental housing, but also for [single family housing]."
LeaseLock was founded in 2013 by Merrill and president Reichen Kuhl, who connected through Mucker Capital's accelerator program.
Derek Merrill and Reichen Kuhl are the co-founders of LeaseLock.
Kuhl had been struggling with the rental process in New York, and the pair realized that eliminating deposits could make the payment process smoother for renters that wouldn't otherwise meet the criteria. The company launched in 2016, after they put together an insurance product that would scale for future growth.
"There are almost 50 million apartment homes in the United States," said Merrill. "About a third of those are enterprise and another two thirds are kind-of independent owners. And if you look across all of those, you could ask who would want [to deal with a] deposit in any one of those? And the answer is nobody. So the market is gigantic. And I think we're just scratching the surface."
The Marina Del Rey company eliminates deposit payments for renters by giving them the ability to pay a small monthly fee in addition to their rent. This payment is integrated in enterprise software systems, so that there is no additional paperwork renters have to complete. If any accidental damage to the property occurs, renters are protected through LeaseLock's insurance.
It operates in all 50 states, and has insured $1 billion in leases to date. Over the course of 2020, the number of homes on the platform grew fivefold, to 1.5 million.
There are a few other companies in the deposit replacement market, like Jetty and Rhino, but those are consumer facing and don't integrate into the software landlords used to collect rent.
"When we started pursuing this kind of integrated approach, it really started to set us apart," Merrill said. "Operators just want to get out of the deposit completely. And the only way to do that is to rip it out of your actual software workflows."
The round was led by London-based Westerly Winds and Wildcat Venture Partners. Its other investors include SoftBank Ventures Asia, Vertex Ventures US, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, American Family Ventures, Moderne Ventures, Strata Equity Group, Veteran Capital and Mucker Capital.
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