It’s been fairly the 12 months for gaming trade exec Pany Haritatos.
Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new recreation studio startup Series Entertainment, in accordance with an SEC doc and affirmation from the corporate. Investors embrace Netflix, Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on investments from seed traders Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after launching the corporate solely a 12 months in the past with a wholesome $7.9 million seed led by a16z.
In between, he’s already made an acquisition. Series purchased cellular recreation studio Pixelberry in July, finest recognized for its interactive fiction recreation Choices: Stories You Play.
Series, additionally recognized within the trade as Series AI, is on a mission to create video video games utilizing LLMs and GenAI. But greater than that, it’s gunning to be the brand new Unity, powering legions of recreation builders. Haritatos and staff have created the Rho Engine, which makes use of GenAI to assist recreation builders construct video games speedily.
One may be skeptical that LLMs will actually be the panacea to humanity that its loudest proponents declare. But gaming is certainly one of many areas that AI is glowing up.
Instead of designing the whole lot from characters to elixir bottles, recreation builders can have AI step in to try this work and to make video games extra interactive than ever. NPCs can flip into wealthy, absolutely developed characters that, for example, haggle with the gamer. Players may be given huge, maybe limitless, capacities for personalization. And so on.
But to do all that, builders want AI-enhanced recreation engines. Series 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 opponents on the market together with, for example, Modi.ai Engine, and Unity’s Muse Chat. But Rho says it sits in a distinct spot. Modi.ai performs duties like bug catching, or figuring out the reason why the video games are crashing. Series 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 12 months in the past with Haritatos that they penned a weblog submit calling Series, “a recreation studio and expertise firm that’s reinventing the way forward for recreation improvement with generative AI.”
Part of what excited these traders was Haritatos himself. He has a long time in recreation improvement and a knack of being on the leading edge at simply the fitting 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 offered it to Zynga. Then he constructed a cellular recreation studio and offered it to Kongregate – a website that rose in the course of the Flash video games period. Haritatos later turned CEO of Kongregate (ultimately promoting the corporate to Swedish gaming studio MTG). In 2020, he was employed to guide Snap’s video games group, creating augmented actuality and embedded video games.
Those chops are why his traders are all massive names in gaming. In addition to nabbing backing from a16z’s game-specific fund, Series landed BITKRAFT. This is a agency based by eSports pioneer Jens Hilgers who cofounded ESL and G2 Esports, and is among the most energetic recreation traders. Ditto for F4 Fund, a agency run by David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, two recreation makers who’ve constructed and offered a number of studios apiece and now make investments.
Series has grown from 17 staff at first of 2024 to over 100 now, the corporate says, with the staff coming from corporations like Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, and Snap.
While Haritatos declined an interview after TechCrunch found the Series A increase, his folks despatched an emailed assertion from him that praised his traders and stated, “We are thrilled that we raised a really profitable $28 million Series A throughout a troublesome 12 months for funding.”
Pitchbook estimates the Series A was for about 15% of the corporate, giving Series a $190 million post-money valuation. The firm declined touch upon the accuracy of that quantity.
