Storycraft — the AI-powered recreation platform the place gamers create, discover, and share their very own interactive story worlds — has raised a $3 million seed spherical.
The funding for the Montreal-based startup will speed up the worldwide multiplatform launch of Storycraft’s multiplayer cellular recreation constructed on Google Cloud, which mixes AI artistic instruments, on-line neighborhood, and social storytelling in by no means earlier than seen methods.
Khosla Ventures led, the spherical, which follows an earlier $2 million pre-seed spherical led by London Enterprise Companions (LVP), and Signalfire.
Storycraft was cofounded by Andy Mauro. He’s a longtime utilized AI innovator behind Nuance’s Nina the world’s first enterprise cellular voice assistant, and Automat, the main product suggestion chatbot (acquired in 2021).
Storycraft creations
With Storycraft, Mauro desires to create the Minecraft of storytelling—a spot the place anybody with a narrative to inform, not simply recreation designers, can flip their concepts into wealthy, playable experiences by working collaboratively with AI.
“Our early gamers have proven us that creating characters, worlds, and tales with AI is a lot greater than only a higher model of a neighborhood crafting recreation,” mentioned Mauro, CEO of Storycraft, in a press release. “It’s truly reigniting a artistic spark gamers thought had gone out. We’ve had individuals inform us that it’s helped them by way of author’s block, that they’ve picked up portray once more, and even that they’re taking much less anxiousness treatment because of discovering a brand new option to specific themselves in Storycraft.”
He added, “Gamers method creativity by way of a lens of enjoyable and low self-judgement when it’s in a recreation. This leads to some uniquely private, and stunningly novel creations from gamers. Not solely are they constructing a world, they can dwell the story inside it.”
Storycraft combines:
- AI Worldbuilding Instruments: Gamers use generative AI to create characters, objects, constructions, presents, and even sky and lighting results to offer every world a novel really feel.
- Social Gameplay: Actual and AI pals can discover and contribute to one another’s worlds and storylines. AI characters ask human gamers to make issues for them, and gamers go to one another’s worlds to gather the required sources making a close to infinite effectively of ongoing inspiration.
- UGC-Pushed Financial system: Gamers earn, commerce, and showcase user-generated content material throughout a shared multiverse. Storycraft is the primary recreation the place actually all the things is created by gamers.
- Emotional Storytelling: Each world is a stage for private, hilarious, heartfelt, or epic narratives. The AI acts as a Muse for the participant to assist them give you concepts, but additionally responds to the main points they supply, upping the artistic ante like a real artistic associate.
Storycraft has raised $3 million.
“AI permits anybody to be each a client and a creator,” mentioned Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, in a press release. “Storycraft introduces a brand new type of social gameplay, the place gamers can construct their very own characters and work together with them in their very own digital worlds.”
Since launching its open alpha, Storycraft has already seen gamers make hundreds of worlds and lots of of hundreds of AI-generated characters, constructions and objects. Many gamers have already spent lots of of hours crafting a number of worlds throughout a variety of genres, together with cozy, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, horror, romance, sci-fi and plenty of others. Fascinatingly, the overwhelming majority of worlds are distinctive creations, not based mostly on pre-existing IP.
The seed funding will help crew growth, product improvement and preparation for the sport’s public beta launch later this 12 months.
