London-based video game developer Iconic AI has raised $4 million in pre-seed funding.
Founded in 2023, Iconic wants to change the way AAA games are developed: major titles made by major developers.
Iconiq CEO John Lusty told Business Insider that the “inflation of developments” was threatening developers' business models.
“The industry has changed from small teams of 30 to 40 people making games with budgets in the millions of dollars to larger teams overseeing games with budgets of $100 million or more,” he said.
“That's causing problems for the industry. The games market is becoming more difficult, and even if there are successful games, it becomes difficult to organize and coordinate because the teams are so large,” he continued.
Iconic hopes to use its AI services to speed up areas such as animation, translation, voice generation, character conversations and testing.
In an interview with BI, Rasti compared his startup's services to how fintech startups have improved customers' user experience in banking.
HodlCo led the $4 million pre-seed round. The fund was founded by Iconic co-founder Junaid Hussain, a former investor at London-based Kingsway Capital.
Hussain told BI that Iconiq “needed someone to fill both roles.”
“You couldn't assemble a team with just a check for $100,000 or even a check for $1 million,” Hussain said. “We needed more to get things moving together. The money came because I was in charge.”
Funding also came from FOV Ventures, Interface Capital, Deepwater Asset Management, and scout funds from Sequoia and Atomico.
Iconiq said the investment round also attracted angel investment from current and former executives from DeepMind, OpenAI, Disney, Tencent and Microsoft.
The company told BI that the round was oversubscribed and that the funds will be used to expand its current staff of 15. The funds will also be used for office space for GPU and Iconic, it added.
Check out Iconic AI’s 10-slide presentation below:
