Infinite Reality: The Billion-Dollar Startup Bringing Metaverse Back From the Dead in 2025

Key Takeaways

• After falling out of favor in recent years, the metaverse is regaining momentum in 2025.
• With billions in funding and significant partnerships, new startups drive renewed interest in the metaverse.
• Though the focus still remains on AI, the metaverse has quietly been evolving in the background.

Just a year ago, the word metaverse had all but vanished from Big Tech’s vocabulary.

The tech industry’s once-favorite buzzword was overshadowed by the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence—a technology that delivered immediate, tangible results.

However, in 2025, the metaverse appears to be staging a surprising comeback—led by the billion-dollar AI startup Infinite Reality.

Infinite Reality Secures $3 Billion

Infinite Reality, based in Boca Raton, Florida, specializes in extended reality and AI, building digital worlds and immersive environments for applications across e-commerce, marketing, and entertainment.

The company claimed it is “determined to improve the way we all connect on the World Wide Web” through “immersive 3D interfaces that are a radical departure from the status quo, yet somehow familiar and intuitive at first glance.”

At the heart of its offerings is the iR Engine, an end-to-end platform that allows users to create and publish immersive spaces, games, and applications without any prior coding experience.

In January, the startup secured a $3 billion funding round from a private global technology investor.

“The ability to provide them a platform where they can not only create a great immersive environment, but one where they own their data, own their customer, and own their experience means the world to Infinite Reality—and to me personally,” said John Acunto, co-founder and CEO of Infinite Reality.

On March 25, Infinite Reality acquired the once-iconic music brand Napster. It announced plans to transform the legacy platform into a social music platform.

After the original Napster service was shut down for breaching copyright law, repeated attempts have been made to reinvent the brand.

Why AI Overtook the Metaverse

The metaverse was once considered the next major phase of the internet, driven largely by Zuckerberg’s vision of deeper virtual connections.

Tech giants like Meta and Microsoft poured billions of dollars into development. Even brands outside of tech, from sportswear to yogurt companies, scrambled to claim their space in the metaverse.

But by late 2023, disillusionment had set in. Progress was slow, use cases remained vague, and many demos featured dated-looking graphics.

Adding to the downfall was the 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Where the metaverse felt distant and speculative, AI offered consumers and companies instant returns.

Businesses quickly realized they could automate tasks, generate content, and boost productivity. It was the obvious win for investors: the value and use cases were clear.

Even Zuckerberg appeared to retreat from his metaverse ambitions. In April 2024, he announced that AI would become Meta’s top focus for the year, while announcing plans to spend up to $40 billion on data centers.

By this point, Reality Labs, the division handling Meta’s metaverse ambitions, had consistently lost billions of dollars since Meta rebranded from Facebook in 2021.

A Return to the Metaverse

In February, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, called 2025 the most pivotal year yet to prove the viability of the metaverse.

In a leaked internal memo obtained by Business Insider , Bosworth said the year was the “most critical” to determine whether the metaverse would be remembered as a visionary feat or a legendary misadventure.

His comments highlighted the deep skepticism that still surrounds the concept.

Meanwhile, Roblox, one of the earliest gaming platforms to flirt with the metaverse, has begun re-entering the space.

Roblox originally distanced itself from the term in early 2023, instead emphasizing broader concepts like “immersive experiences” and “user-generated content.”

Though Roblox still avoids using the term metaverse, it recently teamed up with Google to place advertisements in virtual experiences. The latest infrastructure investments suggest a quiet pivot back toward the vision.

The new focus on immersive experiences comes as the metaverse gaming market is projected to hit $31.6 billion in 2025, with expected growth to $168.4 billion by the end of the decade, according to Statista .

“We’re beginning to see bold moves that fuse gaming and retail in entirely new ways,” Adam Smart, Director of Product for Gaming at AppsFlyer told CCN.

It appears the conversation around the metaverse is slowly circling back, this time merging with AI. If the last metaverse wave was fueled by hype, this one is being driven by integration with the very technology that once eclipsed it.