After a Series A round where it was financed with around seven million dollars, the Portuguese startup Didimo moved on to hire specialist Peter Alau to grow in the video game sector
Start-up Didimo, a specialist in the development of high-fidelity digital humans, announced that it had hired veteran Peter Alau, who joins the executive team as Senior Business Development Director.
“Alau’s experience in the industry will drive the technology’s growth so that it can meet the needs of the industry and help game creators populate digital worlds with more personalization and greater efficiency”, says Didimo.
Alau has extensive experience in game design, technology development and licensing at brands such as Sony (PlayStation), Electronic Arts, Linden Lab (Second Life) and GameSpy. This growth comes after a Series A investment round of USD 7.150 million, which will be allocated to Didimo’s patented cloud-based platform.
In this way, the start-up allows developers to create high-fidelity, fully animated and personalized digital human avatars in 60 seconds.
Peter Alau’s Journey
Alau joins Didimo from artificial intelligence company Spectrum Labs, where he served as Senior Director of Business Development and Intelligence.
He has also held Senior Director of Business Development, Director and Vice President roles at several companies, including video game creator Digital Extremes. Prior to his senior business development roles, Alau was a senior account manager at IGN Entertainment, a media company focused on video games and entertainment.
In 2005, he worked at Electronic Arts as an account manager in the global technology department. From 1996 to 2001, Alau was Account Technical Director at Sony Computer Entertainment America, where he was the primary source of technical information for the development of PS/PS2 titles.
After leaving Sony, Alau joined Linden Lab, the company that released the popular virtual reality game Second Life, as a community manager. “Peter’s insight into the gaming industry will greatly contribute to the evolution of Didimo’s platform and capabilities,” said Jim Franzen, Didimo’s Chief Marketing Officer.
Jim Franzen, Chief Marketing Officer at Didimo underlines that the “critical view [of Peter Alau] on the nuances that are fundamental for a game designer and on the potential of implementing digital twins in the player experience and in the process of developing a game will be fundamental. The next phase of Didimo will be unmissable.”
Peter Alau points out that “with Didimo, companies can offer immersive and personalized digital experiences – something that will change the way we look at growing community engagement and loyalty. We are empowering designers with these features so they can develop custom video games for the metaverse, at scale.”
Didimo’s platform was designed so that video game studios can easily create personalized digital twins of user and non-playable characters (NPCs) at the speed and scale required.
Some of Didimo’s current customers and partners include NOS Comunicações, Ceek, Soleil Game Studies and Sony. These advantages mean that when using Didimo’s platform, game designers can generate thousands of NPCs in a few hours.
All tools and functionalities are equipped with industry standards like Mixamo, ARKit, Amazon Polly, among others, which leads to a fast and customized build, which in turn positively impacts the profitability and efficiency of this process.