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The Mirror raises $2.3M in Founders Fund-led round to build nextgen gaming platform

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg

Jared McCluskey began building games and 3D models in elementary school, found the Second Life platform and began selling those games by middle school, launching his first online business.

Through those endeavors he learned to code without pursuing a computer science degree and later worked for SpaceX, OpenStore, the University of Denver and more. “The Mirror can do the same for many people,” he said.

The Mirror is his startup, founded one year ago, to bring a new perspective to gaming and game development.

“The Mirror is an all in one real-time gaming and  game development platform. Very similar to how Figma brought multiplayer to design, we bring real-time collaboration to game development,” explained McCluskey, in an interview with Refresh Miami. “We think of ourselves as a next generation Roblox … where people can come build and monetize experiences.”

Today, McCluskey is announcing that The Mirror has raised a $2.3 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Founders Fund, with Konvoy Ventures, Abstract VC, Florida Funders, Palm Tree Crew VC, and angel investors participating.

“The Mirror has a fundamentally different approach of using open-source software to bring real-time collaborative game development to a fragmented industry,” said Founders Fund General Partner Keith Rabois, in a statement.

The Mirror is developing a web app plus virtual world development platform that aims to provide indie game developers and 3D creators with out-of-the-box multiplayer networking, a physics sandbox and community-based user-generated content, allowing for easy monetization. “We appeal starting at the no-code developer with the features we’re offering and will eventually offer full-blown scripting as well,” McCluskey said

How is The Mirror different? McCluskey explained that when you build on Roblox or Core Games, you choose to be locked into that platform you are building on forever. And on the artistic side, you are also locked into their style.  “We’re building on an open source engine called Godot and the great thing about that is we will be releasing features that make us interoperable with a lot of pieces of Godot. We encourage people to use that open source game engine, and then they can eventually even export what they build off of The Mirror so that they can run it as their own game if they wish. That’s on our roadmap.”

Now in the early beta testing phase, The Mirror is seeking user feedback, said McCluskey, founder, CEO and CTO of the 15-member team. “We’d love for people to join our Reddit and our Discord and talk with us. We’d love to send people our early version and get their thoughts.”

McCluskey moved to Miami from Denver last year to work at ecommerce startup OpenStore with plans to stay at least three to five years. ‘But I had been thinking about doing this for about 15 years and the timing seemed to be perfect,” he said. With the new funding, The Mirror will hire more stellar engineers to scale up R&D, McCluskey said.

“Jared is a web3 community builder and with the limitless experiences and creativity the company is offering to users, we believe The Mirror will be at the forefront of the metaverse,” said Florida Funders Managing Partner Tom Wallace in an email.

 Miami has been a key player in this story, too.

“Whenever I meet people, it’s how can I help – what the mayor has been pushing forward,” McCluskey said. “People are just so eager and excited to help each other out and I think that produces a lot of synergies and excitement and momentum in the community here. It’s very easy to get plugged in with people who want to build each other up and I think it’s a great long-term advantage of Miami.”

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Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]

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