Meet Alistair Bryan and Jaie Genadt, Co-Founders at Metaverse Events Company: Flox

Flox is a revolutionary and intuitive metaverse event platform. It helps to drive more engagement in virtual and hybrid (physical and virtual) events. Having worked in physical real life events and seen the first virtual event platforms that came out we could see there was a need to create something new.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
Virtual events existed before Flox, but their appeal was limited, impersonal and uninspiring. With virtual events continuing to rise in popularity even after pandemic restrictions ended, we saw a gap in the market to create the most human and engaging versions. More organisations see the benefit of virtual or hybrid options to deliver their sustainability agenda, encourage diversity and cut costs – but they want the experience to be amazing.

A quote from Richard Branson that really inspired our idea was “The best thing that can be said about webinars is they give you the sensation of being in a coma without the worry or inconvenience”. That’s the problem we wanted to solve: the 2D gallery view user interface and passive viewing. So, we set out to design a platform that replicates the spontaneity, collaborative opportunity and live excitement of in-person events and experiences that allowed participants to be present in the same space with others – regardless of whether they can be there physically or not.

The name and aim of Flox was inspired by murmurations of birds, where the individual powers the collective experience. So, when creating our virtual events platform we focussed on the individual user experience, aiming to create a far more creative, collective one. Harnessing the ideas and creativity of each individual to fuel the power and progress of the collective.
 

 

How has Flox evolved over the past few years?

 
We had our first event in May 2022 for a global food and drinks brand, which had around 3,000 attendees from over 70 countries with live action translated instantly into 8 languages saving 338 metric tonnes of CO2. We are now load-tested to 25,000 concurrent users and aim to be up to 100,000 within six months.

Our tech is becoming increasingly life-like. Our avatars have been designed so users can take a selfie and the image is wrapped onto the digital presence, making it easier to recognise real-life colleagues and contacts within the virtual event space.
 

What can we hope to see from you/Flox in the future?

 
The future for Flox will involve expansion of all kinds. We expect to see our company grow in size, becoming a culture-rich and world-renowned integrated family of talent to help stretch the way we engage and communicate with our audiences and expand on our client base. There are many adjacent markets to events that we can see as being “disruptable” with our platform – Learning, training, retail, gaming to name a few.

As the metaverse becomes the norm for virtual experiences we are looking forward to creating new worlds, bespoke environments and new functionality for our customers. We’ll also continue to build on our products, broadening their capacity, customisability and collaborative features to ultimately get even closer to replicating in-person events.

A long-term goal of ours is to reduce the CO2 impact of 10,000’s of events, eventually offering a net zero alternative.

We are part of the metaverse revolution – It was estimated that the Metaverse global market size stood in 2022, rose to $47.48 billion, before surging to $678.8 billion by 2030. This is an industry that is here to stay and not a short-term fad, so the future for Flox is looking extremely optimistic.