Inside This $15 Billion Metaverse Startup And Its Anonymous Multi-Billion Dollar Investor

Forbes

Florida-based Infinite Reality claims it raised more than $3 billion from a sole unnamed investor. That would make the obscure company the beneficiary of one of the biggest funding rounds of the year. Not all is as it seems.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/04/24/infinite-reality-john-acunto-155-billion-metaverse-startup-biggest-fundraise/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now

00:07is my Forbes colleague, reporter Phoebe Liu. Phoebe, thank you so much for joining me.

00:11Thank you, Brittany, for having me.

00:13I want to talk about one of your latest pieces for Forbes, and it's entitled this,

00:18Magic Money, the Mysterious Case of the $15 Billion Metaverse Startup and its Anonymous

00:23Multi-Billion Dollar Investor. And since you published this, you now have some details on

00:27that multi-billion dollar investor, but I want to talk about the company. And at the beginning of

00:32your piece, you set the scene for us really well. You have Infinite Reality. That's the company we're

00:37talking about, the co-founder and CEO on the stage talking to a crowd in February of this year. And

00:43this is what he says, quote, do you really think that we would talk about a $3 billion investments

00:48and be one of the largest companies in our space if we really weren't doing what we're doing? And

00:53then he goes on to say this, stand up and clap for yourselves. You built a $12 billion company.

00:57And since then, earlier in April, the company now values itself at $15.5 billion. So they're

01:05throwing around a lot of numbers here in the billions. First of all, what does this company

01:10do? Yeah, so that is kind of a little bit of a complicated question to answer. The company does

01:15a lot of things. I believe it bills itself as kind of a leader in the next generation of digital

01:21media, e-commerce. They do some stuff with gaming, social media, and they don't use the word metaverse,

01:28but they do a lot of work in kind of the extended reality and augmented reality immersive experience

01:34spaces. And they've lately been kind of emphasizing, like a lot of other companies, how they're leaning

01:41into AI to kind of make these experiences more personalized. Yeah, so a little bit on the history

01:47of the company. It started in 2019, when a group of people, including Infinite Realities, now CEO,

01:54John Acunto, bought kind of the assets of a social network called SU, TSU. That company's whole thesis

02:05was kind of to give creators back more of the money that they were making off of social engagement,

02:12which is a really great thing. But giving creators 90% of a company isn't really a model for business

02:19success. So the company went bankrupt. These people bought the assets and kind of rebranded it. And I

02:25think over the years since then, mostly between early 2022 and now, the company has acquired a lot

02:32of other companies in kind of the metaverse, extended reality space, and some AI companies as well,

02:39kind of morphed into, I guess, a platform or marketplace for people who want to

02:46kind of sell products or get into the immersive reality space. So they can kind of just reach out

02:54to Infinite Reality and say like, hey, we want to do this thing to create an immersive experience to

02:59drive client engagement or something like that. And ideally, the company kind of helps them with that.

03:03And that's where they're trying to go from here. So infinite reality doesn't fill itself exactly as

03:08being someone in the metaverse space, but they are, they deal with extended reality. Are they well

03:15known in this industry? What does that look like? Yeah, so I guess with the amount of money that

03:19they've raised and kind of the valuations that they've been advertised, basically, that would be,

03:25so they've raised more than $3 billion. And according to kind of pitch book estimates, the total amount of

03:34venture funding in the metaverse space in the last year is less than double that. So kind of the company

03:40would be a major industry leader and have made like a really big impression in the space. But we talked to

03:47kind of several investors or other founders who also have kind of leading companies in the space,

03:54and most of them hadn't really heard of infinite reality. We're not really sure why this is the

04:00case. I don't know if it has to do with the way their products are reaching certain audiences versus

04:05not, or how they're marketing. But that was kind of what they told us that they had never really heard

04:10of the company. One person said that infinite reality kind of didn't make a ripple in the space.

04:18That's really interesting that investors right now you're saying aren't really pouring money into the

04:23metaverse space. Infinite reality isn't buzzy in this industry, not well known. Then why this

04:30enormous investment into infinite reality? How much did they make in revenue last year? Do you think

04:35that qualifies this $3 billion investment? Yeah, that's a really great question. And that is kind of

04:41part of why my colleague Ian and I thought this story was so intriguing. Just because, I mean,

04:48as kind of a backdrop to this, we're in a world where valuations are really, really high, especially

04:54for companies that kind of advertise themselves as playing into emphasizing AI and kind of the

05:01potential that AI has to change the world. There are a lot of companies with really high valuations

05:07compared to revenue. However, infinite reality, I believe they told me they made $75 million in revenue in

05:132024. And compared to kind of a $15.5 billion valuation, that's more than 200 times its revenue.

05:23That's a much higher revenue multiple than some of kind of the buzziest AI startups. I believe OpenAI and

05:31Anthropic, two of the leaders in that industry right now, both have multiples under 50x.

05:38I mean, that's incredible. When you look at that, a tech company, you're saying these big names like

05:44Anthropic, they're not worth a couple hundred times more than the revenue they brought in in

05:50the past year. So how are they landing on this valuation of $15.5 billion? Do you have any

05:56information on that? What goes into a private company's valuation kind of just depends solely

06:02on what the company and the person kind of buying a stake in the company, the investor agrees on?

06:09There's kind of no regulation to necessarily get it vetted by external, I don't know, accounting firms,

06:17for example. I believe infinite reality did do that, but it's kind of unclear how much due diligence

06:24exactly went into that process. There's definitely, of course, a chance that infinite reality does grow

06:30into that really huge valuation. And if so, that would be one of, I think, the biggest and most

06:36astonishing success stories, especially in the augmented reality space, which has seen declining

06:42investor interest in the last couple of years. And especially because you report that the company

06:49has, quote, cash flow problems. They were unable to pay their bills at some point. Talk to us about

06:55those money issues that the company was facing before this $3 billion investment.

07:00So when my colleague Ian and I were kind of looking into infinite reality and John Acunto,

07:06at the time we were trying to decide whether John should be on our billionaires list, thanks to his

07:1112% stake in infinite reality. We did a lawsuit screen and found that some contractors and kind of

07:19businesses that had helped infinite reality with some of its acquisitions

07:23had sued for nonpayment. I think most of those claims have either been settled or paid off,

07:30but not all of them yet. And we were kind of just wondering if a company has three plus billion

07:36dollars of cash in the bank that it hasn't spent because a lot of its acquisitions had mostly been

07:41stock, actually. Why is it kind of struggling to pay bills that are kind of in the tens of thousands

07:49of dollars in some cases, ranging from, I think, three million was the biggest one we saw at that

07:55time. And I talked to infinite reality about this. And basically their chief marketing officer explained

08:03to me that when infinite reality is kind of acquiring companies at the pace that it is,

08:09um, sometimes they weren't aware of these non-payment claims that had existed, um, which, yeah, it's not

08:19uncommon for a startup, um, to have cashflow issues. Um, it's really hard to make a business profitable,

08:25um, and that all makes sense. Um, that said, there are still several claims of non-payment. Um,

08:33there was one that was just filed in March of this year, um, against the drone racing league,

08:38one of infinite realities portfolio companies that had acquired, um, last year. And I believe in that

08:45case, the drone racing league didn't kind of respond to the lawsuit and it's in the process of

08:50entering a default judgment. Um, in another case, um, infinite reality was terminating its SPAC deal to

08:57go public. That termination process started in December of 2024. Um, and in connection with that

09:04termination, they were supposed to pay a $7 million termination fee. Um, and I think last time I

09:10checked, which was probably late March, they still hadn't paid the fee. So it just kind of, we're

09:15wondering like, is infinite reality, um, kind of saving the cash it has or that it says it has, um,

09:24in their bank for some future project, or I guess just why can it not pay these seemingly negligible,

09:31um, fees given how much money that they've raised. I want to now turn the conversation

09:36to the CEO here who we talked about at the beginning when he was on stage, really hyping

09:41up infinite reality. And that's John Acunto. I'm curious in your reporting, did you find if he was a

09:48billionaire, who exactly is he? Yeah, for sure. So I think in addition to kind of running a lot of

09:53companies in the advertising and media space, I think he ran this company called AdSouth, um,

10:00which was kind of an advertising media company that was public for a couple of years. Um, it's not

10:06really clear what he was doing at all times, um, in his career before starting infinite reality. Um,

10:12there were a couple of people from his past that had sued him for non-payment, um, in cases that kind

10:18of stretched out more than a decade. Those are all resolved now. They're, they were mostly resolved

10:23within the last year. Um, John told me that he didn't know that there were claims, um, until

10:28recently, possibly because he moved around a lot. Um, there was also a bio that John's representative

10:35sent to me, um, in an email that said he went to Harvard and the University of Florida, but neither of

10:42those universities said they could find him, um, in their records. Um, and when I talked to John

10:48about that, he kind of said that it was a draft that was created when the company didn't have a lot

10:54of employees. Um, I'm not really sure where he did go to school. He said he went to a lot of schools and

11:00would kind of send me that list, but I haven't received it yet. Um, so it's not entirely clear what he

11:08was doing. Um, but he had definitely started and run multiple companies, including AdSouth and

11:14actually PlayGigIt, which is a company he started in 2013 that helps kind of musical artists create

11:20virtual concert experiences for fans to watch and be able to interact with each other while the artist

11:26is like performing. It sounds like from what you're saying, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in his

11:32past. You're also reporting that there's a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to infinite

11:36reality. There were announced investors that don't fully seem to be like investors announced partners

11:41that don't fully seem to be partners. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Definitely not

11:46insinuating that infinite reality is necessarily doing anything wrong, but just, I think throughout

11:51the course of my reporting, some things were like unclear or may not have been exactly as they were

11:58presented. So on your point about the investors, um, the company had kind of a page as a lot of

12:03companies do of like notable investors who had backed the company. Um, and I believe all or most of those

12:11investors had invested in other companies that infinite reality had then acquired in stock for stock

12:18acquisitions and they had become investors through that acquisition. Um, where it gets a little bit murky

12:25and what we see here is that infinite reality maintains that in a lot of those cases, um, those investors

12:33had to vote on the deal and approve and therefore in some way kind of endorse the company. Um, but there was one

12:40investor that told my colleague Ian that they didn't know about the deal until it was announced and had emailed

12:47infinite reality kind of about, uh, Hey, can you provide documentation for the valuation financials? Um, other

12:54supportive documents and they kind of, I don't know, according to our source, um, didn't respond to

13:02those emails. Um, infinite reality kind of told me that they couldn't respond to that, um, without knowing

13:08who the source is, which we couldn't share with them. I know I asked you about the investors that were

13:14announced. Now, what has happened to that list? Yeah. So I think at some point in the last couple of

13:19weeks, infinite reality took down that page from its website, it's unclear if it's related to us

13:25reaching out to all of the investors about it or other outlets reaching out. Um, but that page is now

13:30password protected. And now there seems to be a change since your reporting came out. Like I said,

13:36at the very top, your headline mentioned this multi-billion anonymous investment. Since Forbes

13:43reported on this, that investor is now not anonymous has been named. What details do you have about this

13:50investment? Yeah, for sure. So I think about an hour after we published, um, our initial story about

13:56infinite reality, the company put out a press release kind of saying that the firm that represented the

14:03investor was Sterling Select, um, which is, they described as an affiliate of Sterling Equities,

14:10which is the real estate focused firm, um, co-founded by the former Mets owners, um, the Wilpon

14:18and Katz families. Um, so they were kind of saying that it was related to those families. Um, after doing a

14:28little bit more digging and kind of speaking to the lawyer of Sterling Equities, um, they clarified

14:34that Sterling Equities and Sterling Select are kind of separate entities. And the investment came

14:40from Sterling Select, which builds itself as kind of a venture development firm for very kind of early

14:46stage companies. Um, they help mentor, sometimes they help companies solicit deals, and sometimes

14:51they back companies financially. And they were kind of saying that the 3 billion all came from Sterling

14:55Select. Um, Sterling Select actually has a really long history with infinite reality in the sense

15:02that according to kind of a court document, um, the firm helped co-found RECT, which was one of

15:09infinite reality's major acquisitions in 2022. And what would make Sterling Select exactly pour

15:173 billion dollars into infinite realities? Aside from this long history there, is there any indication of

15:24what they saw in infinite realities that made them think, oh, this is a really good investment?

15:29That is, uh, the 3 billion dollar question. Um, and definitely something we're still trying to

15:35understand better, um, because it's kind of an incredible investment. Um, I talked to several

15:40professors that were kind of like, this is one of the biggest deals of the last couple of years, um,

15:46regardless of how many investors were in the round. And for that to all come from one firm,

15:53um, is pretty incredible. Um, it seems like after the press release, um, one of the managing partners

16:01of the firm kind of went on social media and put out a statement kind of saying how much they

16:07saw in infinite reality and its kind of potential to change how we interact with the media, um,

16:13and kind of exist on the web and more immersive spaces than we do now, but definitely still an

16:21open question. This seems to be somewhat of a historic investment as you're saying. So I'm sure

16:26you will be following any developments to this story and I hope we can continue the conversation.

16:30Phoebe Liu, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much, Brittany.

Category

Transcript

Recommended