Tommaso Di Bartolo wrote the book on the metaverse. Literally. He is the author of Navigating the Metaverse and a UC Berkeley faculty member [Forbes]. Now he is trying to build one that consumers actually use, and he is wiring crypto rewards into the floor of it.
His company, Phygtl, Inc., is a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2022 that describes itself as a Web3 augmented-reality metaverse for consumer engagement, socialization, and shopping [Crunchbase]. The pitch, in plain English: point your phone at the world, see a digital layer on top of it, interact with brands and other users inside that layer, and earn on-chain rewards for the time you spend there. The Org describes the underlying product as a spatial computing platform that merges physical and digital worlds for co-creation [The Org].
That is an ambitious sentence. It is also, notably, the part of the consumer internet that the largest companies in the world have spent the past four years trying and failing to crack. Phygtl is taking a swing at it from the pre-seed stage with a team of 11 to 50 people [Wellfound].
The bet
Phygtl's wedge is the overlap of three things that rarely sit in the same product: augmented reality, blockchain-based rewards, and shopping. Most AR consumer apps to date have been filters or games. Most Web3 consumer apps have been wallets or marketplaces. Phygtl is trying to collapse the two into a single loop where the act of looking at, sharing, or buying something in the physical world is also the act of earning inside a digital economy [Crunchbase].
The target user is a B2C consumer, not an enterprise buyer. That is a deliberate choice. Di Bartolo has argued publicly that the metaverse should be understood as an extension of real life that empowers individuals and provides access to the financial system [SustainDAO Podcast]. Phygtl's product surface, as described in its public listings, is the commercial expression of that thesis: socialization plus shopping plus a rewards rail.
Why it could be big
The macro tailwind is real, even if it has cooled from its 2021 peak. Crypto-adjacent hiring grew 395% in the run-up to 2022, according to Business Insider [Business Insider, 2022], and the spatial computing category has been re-energized by Apple's Vision Pro and Meta's continued Quest investment. A consumer app that gives shoppers a tangible reason to put a phone (or, eventually, a headset) between themselves and a storefront is the kind of bet venture investors keep funding because the prize, if it works, is a new consumer surface.
Di Bartolo himself sits inside the network that tends to back these bets. He is a Forbes Business Council member [Forbes] and an advisor to Silicon Valley accelerators including Google Launchpad, Draper University, and The Alchemist, with guest lecturing at Stanford on top of his Berkeley faculty role [Speakerpedia]. That is a thick rolodex for a pre-seed founder, and it matters in a category where distribution partnerships with brands are the difference between a tech demo and a business.
The team and traction
Di Bartolo is Co-Founder and CEO [Crunchbase]. He is a serial entrepreneur with two prior exits and is the co-author of The Metaverse Economy in addition to Navigating the Metaverse [Forbes][Slideshare]. Originally from Sicily, he relocated to Silicon Valley and has built a public profile as a keynote speaker on the category [BusinessABC][Yahoo Finance]. He also holds board or advisor seats at HandsOn.TV, LoadTap, and txtsmarter [Champions Speakers].
The company itself reports a headcount of 11 to 50 [Wellfound] and is actively hiring, with a User Research Intern role open for the first half of 2026 [LinkedIn]. A user research hire at this stage is a tell: Phygtl is in the part of the build where it needs to learn what consumers will actually do inside the product, not just what they will click on in a deck.
| Phygtl at a glance | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2022 [Crunchbase] |
| Headquarters | Silicon Valley [Wellfound] |
| Stage | Pre-Seed |
| Headcount | 11 to 50 [Wellfound] |
| Business model | B2C [Crunchbase] |
| Open roles | User Research Intern, H1 2026 [LinkedIn] |
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say: consumer Web3 has been a graveyard for capital, and AR-native shopping behavior has not yet shown up at scale outside of a handful of beauty and furniture try-on use cases. A Reddit thread from prospective interns also flagged friction in Phygtl's recruiting funnel, including unanswered outreach and broken application links [Reddit], the kind of operational seam that pre-seed companies have to clean up before they raise a priced round.
What bulls will answer: Phygtl is choosing to build the consumer loop now, while spatial hardware is finally in market and while the on-chain rewards infrastructure has matured past the 2021 gas-fee era. Di Bartolo's network across Google Launchpad, Draper University, and The Alchemist [Speakerpedia] gives the company a credible path to brand partners and to a seed round, and the active user-research hire [LinkedIn] suggests the team is treating product-market fit as something to be measured rather than declared. The category is hard. So is the team's bet that it is solvable from the consumer side first.
What to watch
Three things over the next twelve months. First, a priced funding round: Phygtl has no disclosed institutional backers in the public databases yet [Crunchbase][PitchBook], and a named lead investor would be the clearest signal that the thesis has converted a check-writer. Second, a flagship brand partner, since a B2C metaverse without a recognizable retail or media tenant is a tech demo. Third, any public usage metric, whether that is downloads, monthly actives, or rewards distributed, that lets outsiders judge whether the AR-plus-Web3 loop is actually closing.
The metaverse trade has been declared dead more than once. Phygtl is one of the companies betting the obituary was early. Will consumers open an app to walk through a store that is also a wallet?