If Sesame Street still ran its Word of the Day segment, today’s word—and yesterday’s...and the day’s before—would be “metaverse.”

But what does that word actually mean?

Well, not all metaverse visions are created equal. Meta sees a virtual-reality metaverse used by businesses and consumers alike, while companies like Niantic swear by augmented reality. Meanwhile, Linden Lab’s Second Life, which lets players create virtual avatars and literally live a second life in-game, has been chugging along happily on the PC since 2003.

One of the most successful players in the metaverse world is Roblox. Founded in 2004, the platform now has 47 million daily active users globally and 9.5 million developers who build out “experiences,” aka user-created worlds and games.

• Roblox is more akin to Fortnite–parent Epic Games, in that it’s focused on building an immersive world within existing gaming tech, rather than investing heavily in nascent tech like AR and VR.
• In July 2020, the company told The Verge that over half of American children play the game.

Craig Donato, chief business officer at Roblox, told Emerging Tech Brew that part of what makes Roblox successful is its bottom-up reliance on the creator community, which develops all of the experiences found in-game, which can range from DJing a party to playing a game of cops and robbers.

• “Our job is simply to enable creators to pursue their vision,” Donato said. “The good news for us is if we have nine, 10 million people building on our platform, that tends to work itself out.”

Big picture: Despite Roblox’s progress, Donato emphasized that we are still in the very early days of the metaverse, and it will be a while before we see things like interoperability between metaverses and full immersion.

“There’s so much more when we think about kind of where we are in the metaverse journey, we’re probably somewhere in the first inning,” Donato said. “Right now we’re just building the stack. We’re all building the stack.”

Click here to learn more about Roblox’s vision for the metaverse.—JM

Another week, another billion-dollar battery plant announced in the US.

Toyota plans to spend $1.29 billion to build an EV battery facility in North Carolina—the first controlled solely by the Japanese automaker rather than a joint venture with a battery company. It aims for the plant to begin production in 2025.

• In October, Toyota announced it would invest $3.4 billion on automotive battery development and production in the US over the next 10 years.
• That figure is part of the $13.5 billion the company plans to spend on batteries globally as it aims to produce 200 gigawatt hours of batteries and sell 2 million electric cars per year by 2030.

The North Carolina plant will initially build batteries for Toyota’s hybrid vehicles, but in the long term, the automaker plans to produce batteries for its all-electric vehicles.

OEMs look South

States like Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee have become popular for new facilities supporting the EV supply chain.

GM plans to open a $2.3 billion battery plant in Tennessee in 2023. Ford and South Korean battery maker SK Innovation are building three battery plants and an electric truck assembly facility in Tennessee and Kentucky. SK Innovation opened a separate battery plant in Georgia this year.

Zoom in: This deal brings North Carolina into the club. The Toyota plant will be located south of Greensboro and is expected to create about 1,750 jobs.

Zoom out: The Toyota plant will add to the total battery production in the US, which stood at about 8% of the global total in 2020, according to the Department of Energy. Today, more than 75% of battery cell manufacturing capacity is in China.

Click here to read the full story.—GD

As we’ve reported on a near-monthly basis this year, global venture funding is off the walls in 2021. The total amount invested this year is nearing $600 billion, per Crunchbase, compared to $335 billion in all of last year.

Today, we’re zooming in on one specific area to see if those trends hold up.

Spoiler alert: The European tech scene is also red-hot. And a new report just dropped on the State of European Tech in 2021, detailing just how hot.

• Overall: It’s estimated that European tech companies will raise $122 billion this year. That’s nearly 3x higher than last year’s total of $41 billion.
• Most promising startup sector: “Planet positive” companies—aka climate tech/clean tech—were no.1, according to VC respondents, on track to receive 11% of all European funding this year.
• Foreign interest is on the rise: The share of European VC deals with at least one US or Asian investor has climbed steadily from 19% in 2017 to 33% in 2021. This year, 618 different US institutions have participated in at least one European round, compared to 431 last year.

Shock of shocks...European founders are feeling pretty good. Nearly seven in 10 (69%) of founders are “more optimistic” than they were 12 months ago. In the past three years, that number has never broken 40%.

Click here to view this story on-site.—DM

Stat: Ag-tech startups have raised $7.8 billion through Q3 of this year, already 20% more than the full-year total for 2020, per Pitchbook.

Quote: “I thought surely that can’t be right.”—Vince Patton, a Tesla owner, upon learning that Tesla allows people to play video games on its center console, even while the car is moving

Read: In search of lost bitcoin (in the dump).

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Kickstarter is taking its crowdfunding platform to the blockchain.
• A startup wants to launch NFTs into space.
• Meta is working on a full-scale VR re-creation of Cats, the musical, to lure new users.
• Portuguese scientists are trying to make fish fillets out of algae.

Globally, electric vehicles made up 10.8% of new vehicle sales last quarter—the first time that figure pushed over 10%, per BloombergNEF data.

Zoom in: Asian countries were the biggest driver of this global milestone—the region accounted for 935,000 of the 1.7 million EVs sold last quarter. And adoption rates vary a fair amount region to region:

• Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA): As a combined region, 17.4% of new car sales were EVs last quarter.
• Asia Pacific: Over a tenth (12%) of new car sales were EVs.
• Americas: Less than 4% of new cars were EVs last quarter.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Timnit Gebru debuts DAIR, an AI ethics group that will center marginalized communities
• Batteries, the key component of EVs, keep getting cheaper. But that rate is slowing
• A primer on digital twin technology