It’s been fairly the yr for gaming trade exec Pany Haritatos.
Final month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Sequence A for his new recreation studio startup Sequence Leisure, based on an SEC doc and affirmation from the corporate. Traders embrace Netflix, Dell Applied sciences Capital, with follow-on investments from seed traders Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after launching the corporate solely a yr in the past with a wholesome $7.9 million seed led by a16z.
In between, he’s already made an acquisition. Sequence purchased cellular recreation studio Pixelberry in July, greatest recognized for its interactive fiction recreation Decisions: Tales You Play.
Sequence, additionally recognized within the trade as Sequence AI, is on a mission to create video video games utilizing LLMs and GenAI. However greater than that, it’s gunning to be the brand new Unity, powering legions of recreation builders. Haritatos and crew have created the Rho Engine, which makes use of GenAI to assist recreation builders construct video games speedily.
One could be skeptical that LLMs will actually be the panacea to humanity that its loudest proponents declare. However gaming is unquestionably one of many areas that AI is glowing up.
As an alternative of designing every thing from characters to elixir bottles, recreation builders can have AI step in to do this work and to make video games extra interactive than ever. NPCs can flip into wealthy, totally developed characters that, as an example, haggle with the gamer. Gamers could be given huge, maybe limitless, capacities for personalisation. And so forth.
However to do all that, builders want AI-enhanced recreation engines. Sequence payments Rho as the primary AI-native, multimodal full-stack recreation creation platform – that means it handles visuals and audio. To be honest, there are different AI gaming engine rivals on the market together with, as an example, Modi.ai Engine, and Unity’s Muse Chat. However Rho says it sits in a unique spot. Modi.ai performs duties like bug catching, or figuring out explanation why the video games are crashing. Sequence views Muse Chat as extra of an AI assistant. Rho, the corporate says, is meant for full-stack recreation improvement.
A16z traders Joshua Lu and Andrew Chen have been so excited to land the seed deal a yr in the past with Haritatos that they penned a weblog put up calling Sequence, “a recreation studio and expertise firm that’s reinventing the way forward for recreation improvement with generative AI.”
A part of what excited these traders was Haritatos himself. He has many years in recreation improvement and a knack of being on the innovative at simply the correct time. When Adobe’s Flash participant emerged within the late 1990’s as a multimedia tech, he constructed his first studio making browser video games and bought it to Zynga. Then he constructed a cellular recreation studio and bought it to Kongregate – a web site that rose throughout the Flash video games period. Haritatos later grew to become CEO of Kongregate (finally promoting the corporate to Swedish gaming studio MTG). In 2020, he was employed to guide Snap’s video games group, growing augmented actuality and embedded video games.
These chops are why his traders are all massive names in gaming. Along with nabbing backing from a16z’s game-specific fund, Sequence landed BITKRAFT. This can be a agency based by eSports pioneer Jens Hilgers who cofounded ESL and G2 Esports, and is without doubt one of the most lively recreation traders. Ditto for F4 Fund, a agency run by David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, two recreation makers who’ve constructed and bought a number of studios apiece and now make investments.
Sequence has grown from 17 staff at first of 2024 to over 100 now, the corporate says, with the crew coming from corporations like Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, and Snap.
Whereas Haritatos declined an interview after TechCrunch found the Sequence A elevate, his folks despatched an emailed assertion from him that praised his traders and mentioned, “We’re thrilled that we raised a really profitable $28 million Sequence A throughout a troublesome yr for funding.”
Pitchbook estimates the Sequence A was for about 15% of the corporate, giving Sequence a $190 million post-money valuation. The corporate declined touch upon the accuracy of that quantity.