Participated · Seed · Mar 2025

Liminal Experiences is a fully remote game development studio founded in 2022 that builds an AI-powered UGC platform enabling players to create and share 3D episodic RPG-style adventures without coding. The core product includes full building, decorating, and character editing systems, easy quest creation and advanced gameplay editing, and AI-powered storytelling assistance and a game creation concierge. The platform supports seamless creation and sharing of adventures for 1–4 players and aims to let players design episodic narratives and remix official episodes for fandom engagement. Liminal emerged from stealth having raised $5.8M in seed funding to date from games-industry backers including BITKRAFT Ventures, Riot Games, OTK Media Group, and angel investors such as Marc Merrill. The company plans a 2026 alpha and is inviting players to apply to playtest the platform. Founder and CEO Brendan Mulligan, formerly of Riot Games, leads a team including technical cofounder David Lieberman and other developers focused on storytelling and human-centered creativity.

Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

Stoke Games is an all-remote indie studio formed by industry veterans Veigar Bouius and Jon Diesta, whose credits include League of Legends, Hogwarts Legacy, MultiVersus, and Disney Infinity. The studio’s debut is described as a “shooter-adjacent” or strategic shooter that emphasizes strategy, deliberate action, and judgment over twitch reflexes. Stoke plans regular updates, cross-platform play, and “fair monetization practices,” and intends to develop the game in close alignment with community feedback. The team currently employs 14 people and has attracted veterans from Riot, Blizzard, Respawn, Epic, Bungie, and Phoenix Labs. Stoke will use new funding to ramp up playtests with early community members and pursue further expansion through 2024.

Led · Seed · Sep 2023

Wicked Saints builds World Reborn, an interactive, graphic novel–style mobile game that uses augmented reality and real-world missions to teach Gen Z how to stand up for causes. The game ties in-game energy and choices to bite-sized real-world actions—like leaving a note or picking up trash—that players can verify by uploading short videos to a community feed. World Reborn is currently in beta with a small group of users in Canada; the company plans a U.S. teaser launch next year and a full launch within 18 months. Wicked Saints intends to monetize via corporate and nonprofit partnerships that sponsor in-game missions rather than through traditional ads. The company emerged from Niantic’s Black Developers Initiative and has added former Pokémon GO senior software engineer Daphne Larose-Molapo as CTO. Financially, Wicked Saints has raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by Riot Games and Oregon Venture Fund, bringing total funding to $4.6 million including an earlier pre-seed.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2023

Believer is a stealth game studio founded by ex-Riot execs Michael Chow and Steven Snow that aims to build large multiplayer open-world games and original IP where player choices matter. The studio says it will pursue technology development only when necessary to realize its vision and also intends to build franchises across broader entertainment like film and TV. Believer favors platform parity — aiming to make experiences available across many platforms rather than pursuing exclusivity. The company explicitly rejects NFTs while expressing interest in generative AI and responsible application of AI to enhance tools and gameplay without replacing human creators. Believer is in stealth, has made several senior hires from Riot, Bungie, Microsoft and others, and will use funding primarily to expand its team. The founders expect a three- to five-year timeline before a first product launch and emphasize maintaining player- and product-focus during that period.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

Inworld AI builds a Character Engine that powers AI-driven non-player characters (NPCs) for games, entertainment, and interactive experiences. The platform orchestrates multiple machine learning models to produce multimodal character expression—dialogue, memory, goals, emotional intelligence—and can link character 'brains' to animation and rigging in 3D engines. Inworld’s technology is integrated with major game engines and marketplaces, including Unity's AI Marketplace as a Unity Verified Solution and work with Unreal Engine MetaHumans; the company also received an Epic MegaGrant. Customers and partners include Team Miaozi (NetEase Games), Niantic 8th Wall, ILM Immersive, LG UPlus, Alpine Electronics, and community-created mods for Skyrim, Stardew Valley, and Grand Theft Auto V. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate research and development, hire top talent, invest in infrastructure, and launch an open-source version of its Character Engine. Inworld says its approach goes beyond standard LLM chatbots to create lifelike NPC behaviors that can autonomously pursue goals and interact within game worlds. Founded in 2021, Inworld has raised over $100 million to date and its recent financing values the company at more than $500 million. Inworld AI offers a no-code creative suite for building AI characters and interactive digital humans. The company layers advanced generative AI on top of MetaHumans to create personalities, thoughts, memories, and behaviors designed to mimic social human interaction. Its technology powers conversations, emotions, expressions, and gestures, and characters can be designed in minutes and deployed into gaming, entertainment, education, metaverse, or brand experiences. Inworld received an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games to combine its AI solutions with Epic’s MetaHuman technology and enable integration into Unreal Engine experiences. CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn said the company is honored to receive the MegaGrant and is excited to help developers add interactive digital humans. The article does not disclose revenue, users, or other financial metrics. Inworld AI builds AI-powered virtual characters primarily for games and broader entertainment and marketing campaigns. The company offers a platform and integrations with engines like Unreal Engine and Unity to create NPCs and digital representatives with memories, personalities and human-like behaviors. Customers describe characters in natural language and tailor goals, speech patterns, knowledge and voice; characters undergo a training process and query Inworld's cloud-hosted system for dialogue. Inworld launched in 2021, released its first product after a March seed round and is currently in limited beta while exploring pricing and cost-reduction strategies. The company has 42 employees, added chief creative officer John Gaeta, and was selected for the 2022 Disney Accelerator. Proceeds from fundraising are earmarked for product development, research, hiring and customer acquisition as it seeks partners to deploy AI characters beyond gaming. Inworld AI offers a Studio product and beta tools that let developers create richly detailed, conversational NPCs using natural-language core descriptions and configurable character fields with no code. The system runs online and queries large language models to produce unscripted dialogue, while leaving visuals to external art pipelines and integrating with game engines like Unreal and Unity. Characters can be given motivations, personality traits, world knowledge, rote responses, blacklists, and standard safety filters to bias behavior and constrain outputs. In demos the generated characters produced natural-feeling, game-relevant responses, though the company and reviewer noted the demonstrations were limited and staged. Inworld plans to publish a short game to showcase its character generators and is running a private beta with early access applications. The company recently raised $10 million (and counting) from a group of angel investors including Riot Games, The Sandbox, Roblox, Disney, Animoca Brands, Twitch and Oculus. Inworld AI provides a developer platform for creating AI-powered virtual human agents that populate metaverses, VR/AR experiences, games, and other virtual worlds. Its AI enables virtual agents to exhibit unique behaviors and awareness of their context and environment, and agents are embeddable and deployable across a range of immersive realities. The platform is positioned to let brands create virtual representatives for ecommerce, operations, and customer support, and to help enterprises run immersive training and video-game makers build realistic NPCs. The company emphasizes in-world roles such as advising, support, entertainment, and other intended functions. Inworld AI is co-founded by CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn and CTO Michael Ermolenko and is based in Mountain View, Calif. The company raised a $7M seed round, which represents its current disclosed financing event.