5 years ago, our co-founders Daryl and Max met at an entrepreneurship summit organised by Stanford, and quickly became best friends, and later on, business partners in several ventures from technology startups to strategy consulting. Fast forward to 2021, both co-founders coincidently ended up at the same Masters of Science in Innovation & Technopreneurship Course at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

During the Master‘s course as part of their modules, they had to explore ideas within the blockchain space and created a masters report on the Tamagotchi; looking into why people of all ages and genders would become emotionally attached to their pets and deeply care about its wellbeing. Our co-founders decided to validate the concept of NFT browser pets by entering the 2021 Mercury NFT Hackathon (Team: ExMachina) powered by Filecoin, IPFS, FLOW and Decentology winning not just the track award for best use of browser extension but also the grand award.

With the newly formed team, the idea transformed to what is known as MetaPals today and recently secured grant funding support of USD112k from Filecoin, where we can begin to realise our idea of virtual companionship.