Gaming AI engine developers modl.ai close 8.5-million-euro funding deal
The company, co-founded by Professor at the IT University, Sebastian Risi, tackles complex game development problems with automation and an army of bots.
Sebastian RisiDigital Design DepartmentEntrepreneurshipalgorithmsartificial intelligencecomputer games
Written 9 November, 2022 10:43 by Theis Duelund Jensen
modl.ai, working to improve game development with a transformative AI engine, has announced it has closed Series A funding of 8.5 million Euro with lead investor Griffin Gaming Partners and M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund. The company received additional participation from Rendered.vc, PreSeed Ventures, and Transistormedia.
“Game testing is a universal challenge in the gaming industry and automated solutions are notoriously difficult to design – this funding is a sign of recognition and show of faith in the modl.ai team,” says Professor of Digital Design at the IT University of Copenhagen and modl.ai co-founder, Sebastian Risi.
The modl.ai AI engine is redefining game development by equipping developers with an essentially unlimited army of bots that can adapt to various playing styles, employ dynamic moves and tactics. This gives developers the power to enhance automation and remove the redundancies and manual efforts that often stymie and delay the release of new games and updates by months or even years. The market for testing and quality assurance in games alone is several billion dollars, and the need for bot players has become crucial in a multiplayer focused $200Bn+ industry.
With the new funding, the company will expand its reach to make the AI Engine available to developers worldwide. With simple setup, developers will get access to AI players – to not just test and balance their games but also have access to customizable bots who will play their game with or against their player base. modl.ai’s AI Engine works with the major publicly available game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine and can be extended to support any modern game engine.
The games industry is on the cutting edge of technology and innovation; however much of the game development process is highly manual. This means significant creative potential with highly skilled developers, as well as precious speed to market, is lost to rote work and monotonous daily routine. modl.ai aims to change this, building an AI Engine that frees developers to focus on creating, by automating the parts of the game development process that are repetitive and time consuming through AI players.
modl.ai was founded by a team of game developers, engineers, and AI experts. Between them, the company founders have developed and launched more than 30 games for PC, Mac, Playstation, Xbox, Switch, Apple Arcade, and other platforms. The company currently ranks second in the world among private companies for the number of technical game publications its team has authored.
“Testing a video game for bugs and glitches can be tiresome and repetitive. The AI bots that our team develops can help game developers escape the infinity loop of QA testing, creating more time to perform other tasks. Most of our team has worked together in games and AI for more than a decade, and it is very exciting to see how advanced forms of AI can benefit the video game industry,” says Sebastian Risi.
Theis Duelund Jensen, Press Officer, tel: 2555 0447, email: thej@itu.dk