Metaverse company Infinite Reality has been valued at $15.5 billion after purchasing AI firm Touchcast, the company announced Wednesday (April 16).
In purchasing Touchcast, Infinite Reality gets access to products that include artificial intelligence (AI) agent offerings. “Agentic AI is a big part of how consumers and businesses will interact with the web in the future,” Infinite Reality CEO and founder John Acunto said in the announcement.
The $500 million deal comes weeks after Infinite Reality announced plans to purchase music brand Napster, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday. That acquisition is one of several the company is making, the report added, as Infinite Reality tries to establish itself as a key player in the AI and eCommerce spaces.
Touchcast’s technology can convincingly duplicate someone’s speech, so that — to use Bloomberg’s example — a company could create a digital doppelganger of their CEO for investor pitches.
Touchcast Co-founder and CEO Edo Segal told Bloomberg that AI would give Infinite Reality users access to an “infinite universe of agents that occupy different personas and different professions,” essentially giving people access to a stable of AI employees.
The Touchcast acquisition is Infinite Reality’s third purchase this year and its biggest to date, the report said. The company in January announced a $3 billion investment from an unidentified backer whose portfolio focuses on global technology and real estate.
In other artificial intelligence news, PYMNTS wrote Wednesday about the technology’s use in amplifying the potential of data — particularly transaction and payments data — for retailers.
“Legacy silos and fragmented tech stacks have stifled innovation in retail. Yet GenAI’s arrival has intensified the urgency for cohesive data strategies,” that report said. “Early adopters are moving quickly to unify disparate data sources, from point of sale (POS) and customer relationship management (CRM) to inventory, social and customer sentiment, and layer governance and accessibility frameworks on top.”
According to research from “GenAI Applications in Retail Transaction Analysis: Industry Trends and Insights,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Fiserv, more than 90% of surveyed retailers, each of generating at least $500 million in yearly revenue, have integrated GenAI into their transaction data workflows.
“There’s a widening gap between retailers who are AI-enabled and those who are still manually pulling reports from six different systems,” PYMNTS wrote. “It’s not just about speed. It’s about resilience, adaptability and long-term relevance.”
But in spite of growing enthusiasm, the research spotlights an obvious gap between ambition and execution. Under one-third of three retailers rate their data analytics capabilities as “high,” and just 22% felt strong confidence in cross-functional data sharing and collaboration.
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