AI-powered productivity tool Layer AI has raised $1.8 million in a seed funding round towards enhancing its 2D generation for mobile games and eventual expansion into 3D.
The tool’s niche is in intuitive and professional art creation, designed to integrate seamlessly into art pipelines and enhance user experience and productivity.
Layer AI’s seed round saw contributions from The Games Fund, The Games Syndicate, Laton Ventures, Devoted Studios and others. Angel investors included Akin Babayigit, Michele Attisani and Dilpesh Parmar.
The GFR Fund also invested, springing into action after the announcement of its $53.5 million Fund III dedicated to supporting games and AI.
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The $1.8 million funding will support the San Francisco-based team at Layer AI to supercharge production time and work on its 2D art generation for mobile games. Support for AAA games is coming next, and after that Layer AI is looking to create generative sprite and spine animations based on text and images. Then, the company has ambitions to expand into 3D generation.
Layer AI’s core team is comprised of professionals across a range of backgrounds. CEO Volkan Gurel brings experience from engineering and management at MIT, Hunch and Coinbase, CRO Burcu Ozcengiz is ex-Unity, CTO Kuo-chin Lien comes from Appen and XMotors, and board member Mehmet Ecevit previously co-founded the Zynga-acquired studio Gram Games.
Following the seed round, Layer AI is looking to hire a founding frontend engineer and a founding full stack engineer.
"Just like Web 2.0, Cloud computing or mobile unlocked novel applications that beat incumbents and other startup competitors based on a great product experience, we believe the AI revolution will be no different," said Gurel.
"AI has unlocked many new applications that will be built on top of this new tech stack and we plan to win by building the best product experience for artists in the enterprise leveraging the power of all the great foundational models and tools released by OpenAI, Meta, Stability AI and others."
"AI unlocked many opportunities for gaming and we want Layer to be the easiest tool to get on board with and the fastest to ROI," Ozcengiz added.
Among the game developers to have leveraged Layer AI’s tech is Tripledot, indeed tripling its art production speed with the tool and, according to the studio's VP of Creative, "reducing our reliance on outsourcing studios".
Tripledot was already well poised with the incredible accomplishment of fastest-growing European company this year, and has naturally found itself among our Top 50 Game Makers.
