The American company Vatom, developer of metaverse platforms for large companies and for operators of music and leisure events, has chosen Barcelona to expand into the European market.
The Venice, California firm will create Vatom Europe in alliance with Elrow, an electronic music events and festivals company, belonging to the Arnau family and in which the American fund Providence has held a stake since 2017.
With an initial investment of five million euros, Vatom Europe will hire 30 people and will be located at Elrow's headquarters, in the Pedralbes neighborhood, in Barcelona. The European market "will generate 20% additional revenue," explains the firm's founder and CEO, Eric Pulier, although he assures that they are not moving to Barcelona solely for economic reasons.
"Barcelona is a very creative city, one of the best in the world," he expresses in an interview with The New Barcelona Post. Pulier believes that now, "with the structure of the Vatom platform very defined after the constant work of the last five years," it is time to "connect with creative people, with quality content creators, and Barcelona offers them."
In this sense, Barcelona will also serve to "train" advertising agencies and professional services firms in the world of the metaverse and the third generation of the Internet, so that they can respond to the demand of large industrial or service brands.
The Catalan capital will be the base for the creation of a team of developers, with highly technological profiles, who will work jointly with the company's professionals in California to increase the technical and technological capacity of the Vatom platform and globally address projects for clients around the world. "We have a community of developers who contribute improvements and new functionalities to our platform, which can then be commercialized through the marketplace we have on the Vatom platform, and which we want to promote," explains Eric Pulier.
Free collectible NFTs and augmented reality contests
The agreement between Vatom and Elrow was closed after a first collaboration last month to celebrate elrow Town Madrid, "the biggest event we have organized so far, with 35,000 attendees," explains Elrow's executive president, Vicenç Martí, who will assume the direction of Vatom Europe.
Martí explains that the new experiences were very well received among elrow's regular followers: free collectible NFTs were downloaded, and participants engaged in an augmented reality scavenger hunt on the festival grounds to gain access to exclusive offers. "Clearly, the public is eager for immersive virtual experiences like those enabled by Vatom, which is why we are very excited to explore the infinite ways this technology can enhance the future of music festivals and fan engagement," Martí states.
For his part, Eric Pulier emphasizes that solutions for the entertainment and live events sector are just one of the areas where the Vatom platform has applications. He speaks of the health sector, education, the consumer products industry, among others.
He reminds that every major brand, regardless of the sector, that wants to have clients, an audience, will have to resort to the metaverse strategy which, he defends, "is not the future, it is the present." Pulier draws a parallel: if at the end of the nineties of the last century all companies saw the need to be present on the Internet, now the next online strategy is that of Web3 platforms.
Vatom designs metaverse solutions for brands from diverse sectorsThe creator of Vatom, who defines his platform as "agile, flexible and easy to use," argues that the elements that differentiate and are the basis of the third generation of the Internet are the social-human sphere and ownership. "In the third generation, the user interacts and improves the relationship we have with each other and with brands or artists, and, in addition, we will have personal virtual objects that will travel with us wherever we go."
These are aspects that Elrow wants to promote in the electronic music events and festivals it organizes around the world, from Las Vegas to Ibiza. The group is also the promoter of the Los Monegros desert festival, which has been one of the mainstays of the company's growth, led by Juan Arnau, a member of the fifth generation.
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