It's been a very good year for gaming executive Panny Haritatos.
Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new game studio startup, Series Entertainment, according to SEC documents and a confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix and Dell Technologies Capital, with additional investment from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after launching the company just a year ago with a healthy $7.9 million seed led by a16z.
In the meantime, he has already made acquisitions. The series acquired mobile game studio Pixelberry, known for its interactive fiction game Choices: Stories You Play, in July.
Series, also known in the industry as Series AI, is on a mission to create video games using LLM and GenAI. But more than that, it's about becoming the new Unity that powers a lot of game developers. Haritatos and his team created the Rho Engine, which uses GenAI to help game developers build games quickly.
Some may be skeptical whether LLM is really the panacea for humanity that its most vocal proponents claim. But there's no doubt that gaming is one area where AI is gaining traction.
Instead of designing everything from characters to elixir bottles, game developers can let AI step in and do the work, making games more interactive than ever before. NPCs can transform into rich, fully developed characters who, for example, haggle with gamers. Players are given vast, possibly unlimited capabilities for customization. and so on.
But to do all that, developers need an AI-enhanced game engine. The series touts Rho as the first AI-native, multimodal, full-stack game creation platform. That is, it processes visuals and audio. To be fair, there are other AI game engine competitors, such as Modi.ai Engine and Unity's Muse Chat, for example. But Lo says that's elsewhere. Modi.ai performs tasks such as finding bugs and determining why a game crashes. The series sees Muse Chat as an AI assistant. According to the company, Rho is aimed at full-stack game development.
A16z investors Joshua Lu and Andrew Chen were very excited to sign a seed deal with Haritatos a year ago, calling Series “a game studio that is reinventing the future of game development with generative AI. I wrote a blog post called “Technology Company.''
What excited these investors was Haritatos himself. He's been in game development for decades and has a knack for being on the cutting edge at the right time. When Adobe's Flash player emerged as a multimedia technology in the late 1990s, he founded the first studio to create browser games and sold it to Zynga. He then built a mobile game studio and sold it to Kongregate, a site that rose to prominence during the Flash gaming era. Haritatos later became CEO of Kongregate (the company was eventually sold to Swedish game studio MTG). In 2020, he was hired to lead Snap's gaming group, developing augmented reality and embedded games.
Those chops are why his investors are all big names in the gaming industry. In addition to securing support from a16z's dedicated gaming fund, the series has acquired BITKRAFT. This is a company founded by eSports pioneer Jens Hilgers, co-founder of ESL and G2 Esports, and one of the most active gaming investors. The same goes for F4 Fund. F4 Fund is run by two game makers, David Kaye and Joakim Achrén, who have each built, sold, and are currently investing in multiple studios.
The company says the number of employees in the series has grown from 17 in early 2024 to more than 100 today, and the team includes companies such as Zynga, Machine Zone, Google and Snap.
After TechCrunch discovered the Series A funding, Haritatos declined to be interviewed, but his associates sent an emailed statement from him praising the investors and saying, “In a tough year for fundraising, We are thrilled to have successfully raised $28 million in Series A.”
Pitchbook estimates the Series A represents about 15% of the company, giving the series a post-money valuation of $190 million. The company declined to comment on the accuracy of its numbers.