Google officially announced that it had acquired AI-startup Alter on Thursday. However, it did not disclose when it had completed the purchase, nor did it say how much the buyout cost the search engine behemoth. 

A TechCrunch report citing a source within the company said that Alter had been bought by Google roughly two months ago for around $100 million dollars. Additionally, some of the company’s top brass moved to work within the Google ecosystem without any official announcements about their time at Alter. 

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What is Alter?

Alter is an open source, cross-platform software development kit that builds 3D avatar systems with the help of motion capture. The avatars are built from scratch and are meant for web3 interoperability and use in the Metaverse, according to its LinkedIn description. The SDK from Alter helps developers plug in avatars into their games, apps or websites. 

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Not much is known about how Alter functions except that their tech is supposed to make it simple for developers to add it into their products. Prior to its acquisition for $100 million by Google, the company acquired a machine learning startup called Comixify.ai which was working on VFX tech for semi-professional creators and video enthusiasts. 

The company was founded as Facemoji was its Chief Executive Officer, Robin Raszka in 2017. Originally, the company developed a plug and play system to help developers add in avatar systems into their products.

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The pivot to Alter happened sometime during the lifetime of the startup as it looked for a way to become a part of the Metaverse. This included not only using motion capture to create a rendition of the person, but also of the person’s clothing and accessories. 

Raszka had stated in an interview with TechCrunch that the tech “boils down to ego” because people want to show off what they have.