It’s been quite a year for gaming industry executive Pany Haritatos.
Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new game studio startup. Series entertainmentAccording to An SEC document and confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix, Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on investment from seed investor Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after the company launched just over a year ago with a healthy $7.9 million seed led by a16z.
In between, he has already made an acquisition. The series bought mobile game studio Pixelberry in July, best known for its interactive fiction game Choices: Stories You Play.
Series, also known as Series AI in the industry, is on a mission to create video games using LLMs and GenAI. But more than that, it’s trying to be the new unity powering legions of game developers. Haritatos and team created the Rho Engine, which uses GenAI to help game developers build games faster.
One may doubt that LLMs will really be the panacea for humanity that its loftiest proponents claim. But gaming is definitely one of the areas where AI is shining.
Instead of designing everything from characters to elixir bottles, game developers can step in AI to do the work and make games more interactive than ever before. NPCs can evolve into rich, fully developed characters who, for example, Chat with the gamer. Players can be given vast, perhaps unlimited, abilities to customize. Etc. Etc.
But to do all this, developers need a game engine better than AI. The series bills Rho as the first AI-native, multimodal full-stack game creation platform – meaning it handles visuals and audio. To be fair, there are other AI gaming engine competitors, for example, Modi.ai Engine, and Unity’s Muse Chat. But Rho says it sits in a different place. Modi.ai performs tasks like catching bugs, or identifying reasons why games crash. The series sees Muse Chat as an AI assistant. Rho, the company says, is for full-stack game development.
A16z investors Joshua Lowe and Andrew Chen were so excited to land a seed deal with Heretatos a year ago that they put pen to paper. A blog post Calling Series, “a game studio and technology company reinventing the future of game development with creative AI.”
Part of what excited these investors was the heritatos themselves. He has decades of experience in game development and a knack for being great at just the right time. When Adobe’s Flash Player emerged as a multimedia tech giant in the late 1990s, it created its first browser games studio and sold it to Zynga. Then he created a mobile game studio and sold it to Kongregate – a site that emerged in the era of Flash games. Haritatos later became CEO of Kongregate (eventually selling the company to Swedish gaming studio MTG). In 2020, he was hired to lead Snap’s games group, developing augmented reality and embedded games.
Those chips are why its investors are all the big names in gaming. In addition to being backed by a16z’s game-specific fund, the series lands on BITKRAFT. It is a firm founded by eSports pioneer Jens Hilgers, who co-founded ESL and G2 Esports, and is one of the game’s most active investors. Ditto for F4 Fund, a firm run by David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, two game developers who have built and sold multiple studios and are now investing.
Series has grown from 17 employees at the start of 2024 to more than 100 now, the company says, with a team coming from companies like Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, and Snap.
While Haritatos declined an interview after discovering TechCrunch’s Series A raise, its people sent an emailed statement on its behalf praising its investors and saying, ” We are pleased to have raised a very successful $28 million in Series A during a challenging year for funding.”
Pitchbook estimates that the Series A was for about 15% of the company, giving the series a $190 million post-money valuation. The company declined to comment on the accuracy of that number.
Credit : techcrunch.com
