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Image Credits:Series Entertainment
Startups



SERIES, A GENAI GAME DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM, HAS QUIETLY RAISED $28M FROM NETFLIX,
DELL, A16Z, OTHERS

Julie Bort
September 30, 2024



It’s been quite the year for gaming industry exec Pany Haritatos. 

Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new
game studio startup Series Entertainment, according to an SEC document and
confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix, Dell Technologies
Capital, with follow-on investments from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz,
BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after launching the company only a year ago
with a healthy $7.9 million seed led by a16z. 




In between, he’s already made an acquisition. Series bought mobile game studio
Pixelberry in July, best known for its interactive fiction game Choices: Stories
You Play.

Series, also known in the industry as Series AI, is on a mission to create video
games using LLMs and GenAI. But more than that, it’s gunning to be the new
Unity, powering legions of game developers. Haritatos and team have created the
Rho Engine, which uses GenAI to help game developers build games speedily.

One can be skeptical that LLMs will really be the panacea to humanity that its
loudest proponents claim. But gaming is definitely one of the areas that AI is
glowing up. 

Instead of designing everything from characters to elixir bottles, game
developers can have AI step in to do that work and to make games more
interactive than ever. NPCs can turn into rich, fully developed characters that,
for instance, haggle with the gamer. Players can be given vast, perhaps
unlimited, capacities for customization. And so on.

But to do all that, developers need AI-enhanced game engines. 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 out there including, for instance, Modl.ai Engine, and Unity’s Muse
Chat. But Rho says it sits in a different spot. Modl.ai performs tasks like bug
catching, or identifying reasons why the games are crashing. Series views Muse
Chat as more of an AI assistant. Rho, the company says, is intended for
full-stack game development.  



A16z investors Joshua Lu and Andrew Chen were so excited to land the seed deal a
year ago with Haritatos that they penned a blog post calling Series, “a game
studio and technology company that is reinventing the future of game development
with generative AI.” 

Part of what excited these investors was Haritatos himself. He has decades in
game development and a knack of being on the cutting edge at just the right
time. When Adobe’s Flash player emerged in the late 1990’s as a multimedia tech,
he built his first studio making browser games and sold it to Zynga. Then he
built a mobile game studio and sold it to Kongregate – a site that rose during
the Flash games era. 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 chops are why his investors are all big names in gaming. In addition to
nabbing backing from a16z’s game-specific fund, Series landed BITKRAFT. This is
a firm founded by eSports pioneer Jens Hilgers who cofounded ESL and G2 Esports,
and is one of the most active game investors. Ditto for F4 Fund, a firm run by
David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, two game makers who have built and sold multiple
studios apiece and now invest.




Series has grown from 17 employees at the start of 2024 to over 100 now, the
company says, with the team coming from companies like Zynga, Machine Zone,
Google, and Snap. 

While Haritatos declined an interview after TechCrunch discovered the Series A
raise, his people sent an emailed statement from him that praised his investors
and said, “We are thrilled that we raised a very successful $28 million Series A
during a tough year for funding.”

Pitchbook estimates the Series A was for about 15% of the company, giving Series
a $190 million post-money valuation. The company declined comment on the
accuracy of that number.

Topics

AI, Andreessen Horowitz, Bitkraft Ventures, Exclusive, game development, Gaming,
Startups, TC


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