Series AI: The Future of Games Development

From the early days of 8-bit graphics and simple sound effects to today’s beautifully immersive, story-driven games, game developers have continually leveraged technological innovation to evolve their craft.

3D graphics unlocked explorable worlds. Physics engines and powerful graphics chips made those worlds feel magical and real. Advances in network infrastructure meant we could meet friends to play cooperatively and in real time in those new worlds. Development platforms such as Unity and Unreal Engine made creating those experiences more efficient and available across platforms.

And now, game industry veteran Pany Haritatos and the team at Series AI are betting that Generative AI will spark the next evolutionary wave in interactive game development.

Pany has a two decade-long track record of success, having founded and sold game studios to Zynga and Kongregate. Most recently, Pany led the games division at Snap. He has assembled a leadership team that includes top talent from Google, Zynga, Machine Zone, and Snap, that has experience in driving some of the most iconic game franchises of the last decade, such as League of Legends, Magic: The Gathering, and God of War.

Pany and the founding team launched Series AI just over a year ago and hit the ground running. He’s grown the team several times over and acquired Pixelberry, a successful narrative-based mobile game studio. This past July at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the team introduced its AI-native Rho Engine, a creative suite of copilots and AI technologies that integrate with game engines to streamline every aspect of game creation from generating textures and backgrounds, to layering in sound effects and scripting for interactive characters.

At the outset, the Rho Engine is enabling the Series team to bring their own new game ideas to market more efficiently. But that’s not their full intent. Pany and team’s “small ambition” is to disrupt the entire games industry by equipping any experienced game development team with the next-gen tools they need to bring new games to life faster and at a fraction of the cost than with traditional development platforms.

As investors, we appreciate teams who have the experience to understand how work gets done today and the vision to reimagine what it could be. We invested alongside Netflix, a16z, BITKRAFT, F4, and others because Pany and the Series AI team are just that. We look forward to this partnership and to where this Series AI adventure game storyline takes us.