In 2017, our co-founders Daryl and Max met at an entrepreneurship summit organised by Stanford, and quickly became best friends as well as business partners in several ventures. 4 years later, both co-founders coincidentally enrolled in the Masters of Science in Innovation & Technopreneurship Course at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, thus becoming schoolmates!

For one of their Masters‘ modules, they had to explore ideas within the blockchain space and produce a report on their findings. Since they both loved Tamagotchi in their childhoods, they chose this as their focus, looking into why people of all ages and genders would become emotionally attached to these digital pets and care deeply for them, as much as they would real-life pets. They then decided to validate the concept of NFT virtual pets played from a browser window by entering the 2021 Mercury NFT Hackathon (Team: ExMachina), powered by Filecoin, IPFS, FLOW and Decentology. They won not only the track award for best use of browser extension, but also the grand award for the hackathon.

With a newfound team that's rapidly growing today, the concept developed into what you know now as MetaPals! With recently secured grant funding support of USD112k from Filecoin, we are now working hard to grow the idea further and take steps towards realizing our vision of virtual companionship in the web2 and web3 spaces.