Games drove the creation of GPU processors back in the 1990s, so it’s only fitting that artificial intelligence — the technology that GPUs are used to power nowadays — is making its way into nearly every aspect of video game design. In keeping with that trend, on Wednesday a startup called Sett — which is building AI agents to build and run mobile games — is emerging from stealth with $27 million in funding.
The funding was raised in two tranches, the most recent of which was a $15 million Series A, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Saga VC, Vgames and Akin Babayigit — the founder and former head of the UK-based games unicorn Tripledot, who now heads VC firm Arcadia Gaming Advisors — also invested.
Earlier, Sett had raised $12 million in seed funding from F2, Bessemer, and some gaming industry leaders as angel investors.
(In a case of uncanny timing, sources tell me that AppLovin, a would-be competitor of Sett’s, is today announcing the sale of its gaming assets to Tripledot. That deal, for $800 million — not $900 million as AppLovin previously estimated — is set to be publicly confirmed later today around AppLovin’s Q1 earnings. More on that below.)
Up to now, Tel Aviv-based Sett has taken the same approach to ‘stealth mode’ as a lot of other B2B startups. Since being founded in 2022, it’s been under the radar, honing product-market fit and nurturing its early customer base. Today, that customer list features Zynga, Scopely, Playtika, SuperPlay, Rovio, Plarium, Candivore and Unity.
It announced a website five months ago, but now that it’s fully out of stealth, Sett is still not putting its pedal to the marketing metal. It says it has over 100 gaming studios on a waiting list to be onboarded, and so the plan is to use the new funding to hire engineers and AI specialists.
As for the product, the focus is on what CEO Amit Carmi — who co-founded the company with CTO Yoni Blumenfeld — believes is one of the biggest pain points in the mobile gaming business: Getting noticed.
Techcrunch event
Berkeley, CA
|
June 5
“Gaming is one of the most competitive industries in the world,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “There are a lot of players, but you actually have more games than people. It’s pretty easy to build games, but almost impossible, statistically, to make a game that is successful.”
Companies spend a lot on user acquisition marketing to improve those chances of success, he continued, but typically it’s very expensive to build and place that content. On average, approximately $29 billion is spent to make around $100 billion in revenue, according to research from AppsFlyer.
Sett’s solution is an AI agent for game publisher marketing. Extensive user-level tracking is a thing of the past on iOS, so the focus is now on what Carmi describes as “creative content” — in-game and marketing streams of interactive moments built on the aesthetics of the game that aim to draw in users to try out new games, or to play them more.
These “playable” ads and marketing efforts are very catchy at the moment, but they can be very expensive and time-consuming to create, akin to building new versions of the game.
That is where Sett sees an opportunity. What humans previously had to code, place and measure from the ground up can now be built using Sett, the startup claims, 15 times faster and 25 times cheaper.
Arcadia’s Babayigit, from his time at Tripledot, knows first-hand how important marketing is for helping games stand out and get played. He described the idea as a “no brainer” in an interview. “It’s just a phenomenal team and an incredibly talented group of people.”
The opportunity that Sett is targeting is also one that has been proven out. The gaming studio assets that Sett’s competitor AppLovin is selling to Tripledot for $800 million were built out in the first place, we understand, in large part to train the AI models that AppLovin now uses across a wide range of ad and marketing tools, including the creation of its own playable ads for customers by way of SparkLabs.
Now that the AI models and wide networks of users are established — AppLovin has a market cap of $103 billion, despite a lot of short seller noise — the game studios are no longer core to AppLovin. Meanwhile, AppLovin has its sights set on a much bigger prize: It’s one of the companies that has publicly stated it will bid to buy the global business of TikTok.
How much AI is too much?
There is a big question mark over all the AI services that have the capacity to take over an increasing number of functions previously carried out by humans. How much is too much? Is there even a “too much”? Companies like Agave are already putting some AI into the creative process, and arguably, once the genie is out of the bottle, that could be it.
Carmi said while he believes that you will eventually be able to build AI agents to develop and market games end to end, this may not be where Sett settles.
“We believe it’s actually a bigger opportunity than what we’re doing now. This is the reason why we built our game engine and the agentic layer in a way that it generates code and enables us to enter all of what we’re doing basically to the game itself,” he said. “The vision of Sett is really taking both the marketing content and in-game content for now.”
“I don’t think the genesis is to replace ‘all aspects’ of game design and execution,” Babayigit said.
“I don’t even know if that’s possible right now, since to compete in a very crowded area, the bar is SUPER high, so you need to make a game in which the details are SUPER SUPER important. But what I do know is that this team is operating with real technology behind them, so if anyone can make certain parts of game production and distribution automated, it’s them.”
