Executive in the gaming sector Pany Haritatos has had a very eventful year.
An SEC document and confirmation from the company state that he discreetly closed a $28 million Series A last month for his new gaming studio venture, Series Entertainment. Netflix and Dell Technologies Capital are among the investors, while Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund are the follow-on investors. This is after the company was founded just a year prior, led by a16z, with a strong $7.9 million seed.
He’s already made a purchase in the interim. In July, Series acquired Pixelberry, a mobile gaming studio best known for its interactive fiction title Choices: Stories You Play.
The goal of Series, commonly referred to as Series AI in the industry, is to develop video games with LLMs and GenAI. More than that, though, it aims to become the new Unity, driving hordes of game developers. The Rho Engine, developed by Haritatos and colleagues, leverages GenAI to assist game creators in producing games more quickly.
It is reasonable to have doubts about LLMs’ ability to truly cure humanity as its most vocal supporters say. However, one industry where AI is advancing is gaming.
AI can take over character and elixir bottle creation, freeing up game developers to focus on creating more engaging gameplay. This allows for more involved gaming experiences. NPCs can develop into complex, fully realized characters that converse with the player, for example. Gamers may have a plethora of personalization options—possibly infinite. And so forth.
But creators need AI-enhanced gaming engines to do all that. Rho is marketed by Series as the first multimodal, AI-native full-stack game creation platform; that is, it manages both audio and graphics. In all fairness, there are rival AI game engines out there, such as Unity’s Muse Chat and Modi.ai Engine. Rho, nevertheless, claims that it is situated elsewhere. Modi.ai carries out operations such as finding bugs or figuring out why games crash. Muse Chat is seen by series more like an AI helper. The business claims that Rho is designed for full-stack game development.
Joshua Lu and Andrew Chen, investors at A16z, wrote a blog post referring to Series as “a game studio and technology company that is reinventing the future of game development with generative AI” because they were so thrilled to get the seed investment with Haritatos a year ago.
These investors were intrigued in part by Haritatos. With decades of experience in game production, he has a talent for staying on the cutting edge when it matters most. After the multimedia tech breakthrough of Adobe Flash Player in the late 1990s, he founded his first game development studio and sold it to Zynga. He then established a mobile gaming firm, which he sold to Kongregate, a website that gained popularity during the Flash game era. Later, Haritatos was appointed CEO of Kongregate, which he finally sold to the Swedish game developer MTG. He was brought on board in 2020 to head Snap’s games division, which created embedded and augmented reality games.
Due of his skills, his investors are all well-known figures in the gaming industry. Not only did Series secure funding from a16z’s game-specific fund, but they also secured BITKRAFT. One of the most active game investors, Jens Hilgers, cofounded both G2 Esports and ESL and is considered an eSports pioneer. Similarly, F4 Fund is a company led by game developers David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, who had each created and sold multiple studios before beginning their investment career.
According to the company, Series has expanded from 17 people at the beginning of 2024 to over 100 at this point. The team members come from organizations like Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, and Snap.
After TechCrunch learned about the Series A raise, Haritatos rejected an interview, but his representatives wrote an email praising his investors and saying, “We are thrilled that we raised a very successful $28 million Series A during a tough year for funding.”
According to Pitchbook, the Series A represented 15% of the business, meaning the Series had a post-money worth of $190 million. Regarding the authenticity of that figure, the company declined to comment.