Anorak secures $5M to let anyone create their own AI-powered games

Anorak, a London-Chengdu entertainment tech company with the vision of “making any pursuit playable”, today announced a $5 million pre-seed round co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with participation from Supercell and MTG. Anorak is led by CEO Shaun Rutland, who co-founded Hutch – the mobile automotive games studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, acquired by MTG in 2020 – and Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Alpine, a founding employee at Hutch and its former Chief Creative Officer.  They are joined by co-founder Tak Fung, Chief of AI, who leads Anorak's AI lab in Chengdu, China. The company, which began as a generative video research project, now has a 20-strong team across London and Chengdu, developing proprietary inference technology to make generative video faster, cheaper and more controllable, progressively enabling games and experiences to shift from pre-generated to generative, real-time interaction. The company's medium is interactive generative video – generative vide