A16Z GAMES

A16Z GAMES

Financial Services

Building the Future of Games

About us

Over the past decade, games have radically transformed from packaged entertainment to social network-like online services that scale like consumer technology companies. Today’s games also drive innovation across the entire consumer ecosystem through new methods of engagement, retention, and monetization. We believe that games will play a pivotal role in defining how we socialize, play, and work over the next century. Investing Themes: Game Studios: Today’s best games are continually updated online services whose players form an integral part of the game through multiplayer and user-generated content. These “games-as-a-service” have become rich, interactive social networks whose in-game player friendships rival those made in person. Games x Consumer: The rapidly growing number of gamers worldwide has created a thriving ecosystem of consumer apps to support them. As gaming becomes the top way people spend time, we believe some of the most innovative consumer companies will be built around player communities. Infrastructure: As games evolve into virtual worlds and online services, the demand for the tools and services needed to build great games will only continue to skyrocket. We also believe the coming metaverse will be built by games companies, using games technologies.

Website
https://a16z.gg/
Industry
Financial Services
Company size
201-500 employees
Headquarters
The Cloud

Updates

  • View organization page for A16Z GAMES, graphic

    7,286 followers

    How do you get started building a community? When Ryan K. Rigney, marketing director for Odyssey Interactive needed to find a core base of players to launch Omega Strikers, he had a brilliant first move: university esports org Discord servers. As the Games as a Service model has taken over, the role of "Community Manager" has never been more important. Victoria Tran, community director at Among Us maker Innersloth, joins Ryan and a16z's Lester Chen and Tom Hammer to break down what community is, how to build it, and even who to hire. Full episode link in the comments ▶️

  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for Jack Soslow, graphic

    Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

    Today A16Z GAMES is thrilled to lead the $5M seed round for Yellow, who's revolutionizing 3D character creation with generative AI and is developed by a team of top academics. Despite rapid progress in 2D image generation, 3D has remained stubbornly difficult and expensive due to challenges like maintaining clean topology (e.g. water-tight meshes) and requiring numerous intermediate representations (meshes, UV maps, textures, rigs). This complexity makes high-quality 3D incredibly time- and skill-intensive, with top-tier character models taking weeks and costing upwards of $10K. Generative AI hopes to democratize this process by reducing the costs and skill needed to create commercial quality characters. When we first met Yellow's founder, CEO Mandeep Waraich, we were astounded by his infectious energy and drive.. As the former Head of CoreML and Large Models at Google, Mandeep's deep learning expertise and passion for the arts made him the ideal fit for this challenge. Yellow is also developed alongside a team of top academics like: Vincent Sitzmann, from MIT's Scene Representation Group, Christian Rupprecht, who's an Associate Professor at Oxford, and Ludwig Schmidt, who's an acting Assistant Professor in Stanford's Computer Vision Group. What sets Yellow apart is their focus on empowering human creativity through AI. Rather than aiming for pure automation, they're building tools that amplify today's 3D artists while making character creation accessible to all. So, we're thrilled to support Yellow on their journey. You can find: - their website here: yellow3d.com - Their partnership with Tafi: https://lnkd.in/eVUxJtgr - Or our blog post: https://lnkd.in/eebqXpUi The future is bright... and Yellow 🟨

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  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for Robert Yang, graphic

    Co-founder, CEO of Altera, former Assistant Professor at MIT

    Excited to share that we have raised a $9M Seed round at Altera to build digital human beings: machines with fundamental human qualities that are missing in today's AI models. We are starting with Agents who can play any game with you at any time, just like a friend. For more, check out our website (altera.al) / TechCrunch (https://lnkd.in/gxPhtYmh) / VentureBeat (https://lnkd.in/gRu2vZmU) The round is co-led by Patron (Brian Cho, Jason Yeh, Amber Atherton) and First Spark Ventures (Aaron Sisto, Manish Kothari). Special thanks to A16Z GAMES & the A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN program (Jonathan Lai, Jack Soslow, Andrew Chen, and many more).

    Bye-bye bots: Altera's game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt | TechCrunch

    Bye-bye bots: Altera's game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt | TechCrunch

    https://techcrunch.com

  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for Katia Ameri, graphic

    Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

    🚀Big news! The official calendar of events for NY Tech Week is now LIVE, and we are so excited to announce that this is officially our largest TECH WEEK by a16z EVER! - 500+ events hosted by VCs & startups 🤯 - June 3-9 2024 - register at tech-week.com We ran our first NY Tech Week last October, and tens of thousands of founders, investors and operators participated. We heard so many stories of cofounders meeting at Tech Week, GPs meeting LPs, startups meeting their lead Seed investors, and leveraging Tech Week as part of their GTM motion. We're pumped to run it back even bigger this year! We are also so excited to have some incredible sponsors on board this year to make Tech Week happen. Big thank you to Andreessen Horowitz, Fenwick & West, HSBC Innovation Banking, Stripe, PwC, Atlassian, Dialpad & Nasdaq! Here's a sneak peek of some of the exciting highlights you can expect: 💎AI Perspectives with a16z and HSBC with Zane Lackey (a16z, GP), Monique Shivanandan (Chief Data & Analytics Officer, HSBC) & David Sabow (Head of Innovation Banking, HSBC) 💎State of AI: What’s Next? Conversation about the Future of AI with a16z GP Andrew Chen, and Ian Goldstein, Partner at Fenwick  💎Building your GTM motion with Stripe with Jennifer Li (GP, a16z) & Robert Clarkson, (CRO, Americas, Stripe), Colin Kennedy (CBO, Ramp) & Sasha Orloff, (Co-founder & CEO, Puzzle) 💎GenAI Talks with Nasdaq x AWS feat. Kate Jensen (Head of Partnerships, Anthropic), Jon Jones (AWS Vice President), Amit Jain (Cofounder, Luma AI) 💎American Dynamism in NYC with a16z feat. David Ulevitch & Michelle V. 💎 Founder Fireside with the CEO of Notion, Ivan Zhao and Darian Shirazi, GP at Gradient Ventures Variety is at the core of this NY Tech Week. Over 20% of events are focused on AI, and we’re excited to see content on the evolution of finance, health, gaming and more as part of the AI revolution. We are also seeing everything from demo days and pitch competitions to morning yoga, scavenger hunts and golf tournaments… And of course, NY Tech wouldn't be possible without our community of hosts including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Dropbox, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Tableau, Salesforce, Microsoft, MongoDB, Accenture, Dell, Hugging Face, WeWork, Bloomberg, Visa, Union Square Ventures, BoxGroup, 500 Global, Techstars, Lux Capital, Soma Capital, M13, Left Lane, Susa Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Alumni Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Decisive Point, Mucker Capital, NEA, Hearst Ventures, Flybridge, Struck Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, Gold House Ventures, Baseten, B Capital, HOF Capital, Hustle Fund, ElevenLabs, Codi, Arc, Navan, Current, Tech:NYC, NYCEDC, South Park Commons, Lenny's Newsletter & Match Group and 100s more! 🗽 Want the complete list of events? Register here for access: tech-week.com

  • View organization page for A16Z GAMES, graphic

    7,286 followers

    GAMES FUND ONE 🤝 GAMES FUND TWO

    View profile for Andrew Chen, graphic
    Andrew Chen Andrew Chen is an Influencer

    andrewchen.substack.com / a16z

    after many months of cross-country flights, zoom calls, and late night deck revisions... whew... I'm glad to finally be able to share what I've been up to for the past bit: yes, that's right-- A16Z GAMES FUND TWO :) I'm super proud of the team for putting this all together. Huge team effort. This is an all-new, next generation fund that is dedicated to the intersection of TECH x GAMES. It's equally sized to our debut fund that we raised in 2022, and we are excited to invest this new fund across many stages and sectors, from inception to Series A/B. And from AI/infra, web3 games, VR/AR, 3D tooling, gamified apps, game studios, and much more. The fund targets a $300B+ industry that has spawned incredible companies over the past decade, and it's great to be able to build! With this new fund, nothing is too early for us to get involved. We have a new accelerator, SPEEDRUN, where we fund $750k per startup, and plan to invest in several dozen companies each cycle. (In fact, if you have a relevant idea, apply now!) http://sr.a16z.com -- note the May 2024 deadline At later stages, we plan to continue investing in seed, Series A and B, and even later, for startups that have traction or a compelling product built. For Series A/B, the new fund will allow us to work with exceptional teams that have built and launched products, and want to scale their growth. As we've done in the past, we will partner deeply, take board seats, investing tens of millions of dollars, and support companies through their entire journey. This is classic venture capital, and we're excited use these well-worn strategies to build this industry. of course, putting together GAMES FUND TWO was a big collaboration across the firm. We are lucky to be able to work with our wonderful colleagues across American Dynamism, Apps, Infra, and Growth, and within the larger a16z platform to put together this raise. It was a long time in the making, both myself and my fellow Games fund GP Jonathan Lai divided and conquered on behalf of our vertical. Our cofounder Ben Horowitz writes about the broader fundraise here, which I encourage you to read: https://lnkd.in/g-j7JngE And his post: https://lnkd.in/g-iKKT9Z These new a16z funds are being raised just as a new tidal wave has emerged -- generative AI -- that will transform many product categories, but in particular, games and interactive entertainment. This shouldn't be a surprise, as gaming has been the driver of new killer apps for emerging computing platforms. A final note. Thank you to all of the our founders. Thanks to our LPs for supporting us, particularly the new folks who have joined us for Fund 2. Thank you to the amazing team at a16z -- we're so grateful to be part of the broader family. And for me personally, thanks to the entire Games team that we've brought together over the past two years to build this new fund at a16z.

    SR003 Application

    sr.a16z.com

  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for Konstantina Psoma, graphic

    Founder, CEO at Kaedim | Forbes 30u30 Tech

    WE CLOSED OUR $15M SERIES A, LED BY A16Z GAMES 🚀 Everyone is already on the news but wanted to make a more personal note here as well! The team at Kaedim and I are honoured to welcome onboard the world-class a16z team along with Scott Gelb, Nate Mitchell, Eden Chen, Siqi Chen, and Sterling Snow, who joined forces with our team. Everyone has already added immense value to our work and progress, and we are grateful for their help and support! Our $15M Series A, backed by the best in the space, is a testament to this team’s daily sweat and tears to deliver only the best to our customers, to iterate constantly based on feedback and accept nothing less than perfect for what we build (we are not perfect; we just don’t accept it hah so every day is a climb) 🧗 There is a long way ahead, both for the technology we are building and for realising the future of 3D modeling pipelines that we envision. We will remain laser-focused on customers, heads down and build. As a team, we couldn’t be more excited to have people like Jonathan Lai and Jack Soslow on board, who deeply understand the games pipeline and go through walls (literally) to support us. I would also like to take this opportunity to highlight some of our most important backers, who joined much earlier in the journey, and made all of this possible. Thank you for believing in us when proof was much less. Deeply grateful to have worked with Chris Kingsley, CBE, Tom Blomfield, Matt Robinson, Patrick Pichette, Jane Walerud as well as Pioneer Fund. Thank you 🙏 Last, but most importantly, the Kaedim team. I am every day stunned at this team’s grit, force, speed, ambition, smarts, the list goes on. There is nothing that fills me with more joy daily than seeing what each of our team members achieves every single day by going above and beyond and how fast they progress towards world-class. You are the real MVPs Ioanna Marinou, Omkar Chalke, Jorge Sánchez-Cano, Diego Marin Lopez, Rachel Chung, Antonios Papaoikonomou, Cherise Punzalan, Zachary L., John Bridge, Kaiwalya Shukla and so many more! LET’S KEEP BUILDING 🚀 This photo shows how the Marketplace launch got us in the SF office. Cheers to the challenges to come (there are four shots of espresso in there)! Bring it on; we are f ready! 🏋️♂️

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  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for Konstantina Psoma, graphic

    Founder, CEO at Kaedim | Forbes 30u30 Tech

    Really excited to announce that we're joining forces with A16Z GAMES 🚀 It's been a blast working with Jonathan Lai, Jack Soslow and the rest of the stellar a16z team. We also just launched our AI-powered 3D marketplace, sharing with our community 10,000+ ready-to-use 3D assets! Check it out --> https://lnkd.in/ervAG9i3 Thank you to everyone who has supported us in our journey so far, from our customers to our angel investors, who all backed our vision in the early days. Let's change the game - on to the next challenge 💪

    View profile for Jack Soslow, graphic

    Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

    We’re thrilled to announce A16Z GAMES investment in Kaedim 🚀🚀 As costs soar and studios seek solutions, Kaedim's approach stands out. By empowering an internal art team with AI, Kaedim meets studios' high requirements, reduces costs, and generates valuable data in the process. Games have a cost problem. Today, >70% of games are unprofitable and it's getting worse. Since the pandemic, studio costs rose 15%-20% but end consumer game spend increased only 1%. 3D production is a major cost driver. Each AAA game requires 1000s of high-quality 3D art pieces, each of which can take days or weeks to complete. To understand the scale, The Last of Us: Part II had 2,335 people credited for the game, of which only 2% were engineers. Against this backdrop, Generative AI is poised to democratize a complex 3D creation process. However, game studios have stringent requirements around topology, performance, and control that pure AI generation isn't ready to meet... yet. One stringent requirement is topology, which is the constellation of polygons that form a 3d mesh. Studios require their assets to have optimized, flowing topology to ensure performant, artifact-free animation. Today, generative 3D struggles with topology due to architectural limitations. Most models use score-distillation-sampling (SDS) or its derivatives. SDS leverages neural rendering not surface geometry. Extracting clean meshes from NeRFs remains an open research problem. Data limitations also impact generative 3D. Models often rely on 2D priors supplemented with 3D assets. 3D datasets like Objaverse (10M assets) are relatively small, and unfortunately creative efforts like IRL object capture face the NeRF to geometry problem again. While Gen 3D can't meet all studio needs yet, it is a disruptive innovation: >100x faster & cheaper than humans, but with worse topology. As it improves, it will unlock new use cases & grow the pie. A classic case of Christensen's disruption theory. But nothing bridges the gap for today's burning market need, except Kaedim. With a human-in-the-loop, Kaedim generates clean topology. Simultaneously, they are well positioned for Gen 3D's disruption as they are being paid (rather than paying) for a data moat. Kaedim's AI-powered tools turn 3D artists into super-humans. A 3D asset that would otherwise take an artist hours and hundreds of dollars to complete can be done with Kaedim in 20 minutes for $20. Studios who use Kaedim often report 80% speed ups in their production process. This has led to rapid adoption. Kaedim has >250 studio customers and >7 figures in revenue. They are working with the largest AAA studios, film production companies, and e-commerce platforms. We're excited to support Konstantina Psoma and Kaedim on their mission to revolutionize 3D production. Together, we'll empower artists, enable studios, and unlock new possibilities for immersive content! Read more about our investment here: https://lnkd.in/eCkqJfPx cc: Jonathan Lai

    Investing in Kaedim

    Investing in Kaedim

    https://a16z.com

  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View organization page for A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN, graphic

    2,467 followers

    📣 Calling All Founders 📣 SPEEDRUN is coming to Los Angeles this summer. SPEEDRUN is A16Z GAMES’ accelerator for startups building at the intersection of tech x games, and we invest $750k in each selected company 👀 Applications for SR003 will be open from April 1st to May 19th, 2024. get the full scoop here 👉🏼 https://lnkd.in/gVj6Y8dE

    Tech x Games Accelerator Coming to Los Angeles Summer ‘24 | Andreessen Horowitz

    Tech x Games Accelerator Coming to Los Angeles Summer ‘24 | Andreessen Horowitz

    a16z.com

  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for James Gwertzman, graphic

    Artist, investor, executive

    Today I’m excited to announce my involvement as investor and advisor to Snapser, the newest game Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) on the market, and in my opinion, one of the best positioned to succeed long term. Having founded PlayFab, one of the first and still the largest game BaaS, I pay close attention to the entire space. I am proud of what we accomplished at PlayFab, but In my opinion, there is one big unsolved problem that no existing solutions has solved, PlayFab included: self-serve customization. All BaaS services on the market today are either one-size-fits-all (but self-serve and cheap), or customizable (but high-touch and expensive). Each has distinct pros and cons. The advantage of one-size-fits-all is low-cost and huge-scale. Operating the same service across thousands of games is efficient to operate. PlayFab, for example, is free up to 100K players and handles millions of concurrent players. The downside is lack of flexibility. If a PlayFab service doesn’t meet your needs, you need to build and host a custom replacement. This kills the advantage of using a BaaS in the first place, not having to maintain and operate a custom service 24x7. The advantage of bespoke services, by comparison, is flexibility – by definition they provide exactly the services a game needs, but can be quite expensive to deploy. They can also take time to set up depending on how much customization is needed. Enter Snapser. They have neatly solved this problem by building a modern service that is both self-serve AND fully customizable. The heart of their solution are snap-ins: pre-built modules each of which offers specific game services. Game developers can turn on and off whatever modules are needed and immediately see which underlying resources are being consumed: Postgres, Redis, etc. Thanks to this model, developers can build and upload their own snap-ins, thus providing full flexibility and customization, without having to also take on the burden of hosting and operation. This modular approach has also proven to be efficient for the Snapser team itself building and testing new services, one reason why their development velocity has been nothing short of incredible. The other reason is that the Snapser team are backend rockstars. Ajinkya Apte, the CEO, and Jason Davidson, the CTO, headed up backend services for a number of games at Zynga, including Words with Friends, Farmville, and Zynga Poker. They have architected and re-architected services that have repeatedly scaled to millions of players. They are both serious builders and very committed to meeting the needs of developers. This is why I decided to lead the investment in them while I was still at A16Z, and why I've continued to advise them since. They still have a long road ahead – they’ve only just launched their first few live games – but I'm impressed with their progress so far. Curious? Check them out at Snapser at https://snapser.com/.

    snapser.com

  • A16Z GAMES reposted this

    View profile for Troy Kirwin, graphic

    Investing in the Games / 3D Industry @ a16z | ex-Unity

    [New Blog Post] Unbundling the Game Engine: The Rise of Next Generation 3D Creation Engines Now is the time for a new 3D creation engine (aka game engine) to revolutionize the way we create games, film, virtual worlds & simulations… More from Jonathan Lai & me 👇 So WHY now? - Unity, Unreal, Roblox and Godot - the predominant 3D engines - are all 15+ year old technologies architected for a different era of computing - Emergence of GenAI - Cloud computing - New XR devices - Damaged community trust for Unity Today, with photorealistic real-time graphics and powerful consumer hardware, “game engines” are used way beyond video games Thus we’re renaming the game engine to “3D Creation Engine” So WHAT is a Next Gen 3D Creation Engine? It will be: 1. AI Native: unlocking creativity at the speed of thought. Start with a text prompt to lay out a scene. Have an AI co-pilot help auto-fill a scene with assets. Multi-modal underlying models w/ semantic scene understanding 2. Cloud Native: engine should be highly modular, built on microservices and APIs to maximize customization 3. Multiplayer co-creation: for fast iteration by distributed teams (i.e. just like Figma, GDocs, etc) 4. UX that adapts to creators: based on role (artist vs dev), use case, level/skill of creator 5. Community modding enabled out of the box: devs can extend a secure cloud sandbox creation environment to end users HOW will a Next Gen Creation Engine arise? Rather than compete with incumbent engines head on, a new engine will look to be 10x better for a specific use case and unbundle the current engines: 1. Vertical Focus - best serve a specific genre or art style - Looks more like UEFN (modding) than UE (horizontal engine) - Built around a game as a GTM strategy - AI native creation making creator onboarding 10x easier - One such genre/vertical may be AI native games (w/ AI NPCs etc) 2. New Platforms - optimize the engine (runtime and/or authoring environment) for a new platform like XR or Web3D - Just as Unity arose off MacOS/mobile, a new engine should try to be 10x better on a new platform 3. AI World Generator - new consumer-facing tools that reimagine 3D world building all together. Where the "fun" is in the imaginative creation process - Leveraging neural rendering vs traditional means - These engines could start with 3D scene captures that are dynamic & editable (see Gaussian Splatting) - Eventually, they will allow you to generate a scene/world from a single image Big Takeaways: - Existing game engines will persist...but only in the near-term - With a 10x easier creation UX we'll see a cambrian explosion in content diversity - The lines between games & film/TV will continue to blur: Pause Netflix then step into and explore a virtual world Soon, any world our imagination takes us to we'll be able to depict on screen We have much, much more to say in the blog ⬇️ If you're excited to build this future, reach out! https://lnkd.in/g6te8nTS

    Unbundling the Game Engine: The Rise of Next Generation 3D Creation Engines

    Unbundling the Game Engine: The Rise of Next Generation 3D Creation Engines

    https://a16z.com

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