According to an SEC document and confirmation from the company, last month, they quietly closed an oversubscribed Series A round of $28 million for their new game studio startup, Series Entertainment. Investors include Netflix and Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on participation from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes just a year after the company launched with a healthy seed round of $7.9 million led by A16Z.
In between, they’ve already made an acquisition. Series purchased Pixelberry in July, a mobile game studio famous 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 large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. More than that, it aims to become the new Unity, empowering legions of game developers. Hartatos and the team have developed Rho Engine, which uses generative AI to help game developers build games faster.
While there may be doubts about LLMs being a cure-all for humanity, gaming is certainly one field where AI is shining.
Instead of designing everything from characters to honey bottles manually, game developers can now use AI to handle this work, making games more interactive than ever before. Non-playable characters (NPCs) can transform into rich, fully developed characters that, for example, interact dynamically with the gamer. Players could be offered vast, perhaps limitless, customization possibilities.
But to make all of this happen, developers need a better AI-powered game engine. Series bills Rho as the first AI-native, multimodal, full-stack game creation platform—meaning it handles both visuals and audio. To be fair, there are other AI gaming engine competitors, such as the Modi.ai engine and Unity’s Muse Chat. However, Rho claims it occupies a different space. Modi.ai performs tasks like identifying bugs or reasons for game crashes. Series views Muse Chat more as an AI assistant. The company claims Rho is aimed at full-stack game development.
A16Z investors Joshua Lu and Andrew Chen were so excited about the seed deal with Hartatos a year ago that they dubbed Series “a game studio and tech company transforming the future of game development with generative AI.”
Part of what excited these investors was Hartatos himself. He has decades of experience in game development and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Adobe Flash Player emerged as a multimedia tech in the late 1990s, he created his first browser-based game studio and sold it to Zynga. He then created a mobile game studio and sold it to Kongregate, a site that emerged during the Flash games era. Hartatos later became CEO of Kongregate (eventually selling the company to Swedish gaming studio MTG). In 2020, he was recruited to lead Snap’s gaming group, developing augmented reality and embedded games.
This explains why his investors are some of the biggest names in gaming. In addition to being backed by A16Z’s gaming-specific fund, Series landed BITKRAFT, a firm founded by esports pioneer Jens Hilgers, co-founder of ESL and G2 Esports, and one of the most active game investors. There’s also Deto for F4 Fund, run by David Kaye and Joachim Achin, two game creators who have built and sold multiple studios and are now investing.
The company says Series has grown from 17 employees at the start of 2024 to over 100, with team members coming from companies like Zynga, Machine Zone, Google, and Snap.
Although Hartatos declined an interview after the Series A announcement, his team sent an email statement on his behalf praising the investors and saying, “We are thrilled to have successfully raised $28 million for Series A during a tough year for funding.”
PitchBook estimates that the Series A was for about 15% of the company, giving Series a post-money valuation of $190 million. The company declined to comment on the accuracy of this figure.
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