Sett Emerges from Stealth with $27M to Revolutionize Game Development with AI

Game, Sett, Funding: a startup building AI agents for game development emerges from stealth with $27M | TechCrunch

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. "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. 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."

Sett Emerges From Stealth With $27 Million to Bring AI at Scale to Mobile Games Studios

Sett's agentic AI platform creates high-performing marketing and in-game content automatically, at scale, and based on real campaign data. It helps mobile gaming studios move faster, cut production time, and stay competitive in the $100 billion gaming market. TEL AVIV, Israel, May 7, 2025 (Newswire.com) - Sett, an Agentic AI platform for mobile gaming studios, has emerged from stealth today with a $15 million Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, alongside Saga VC, F2 Venture Capital, Vgames, and gaming kingpin Akin Babayigit (Arcadia Gaming Advisors, Tripledot). This latest round follows a $12 million seed round backed by F2 Venture Capital, Bessemer, and gaming industry leaders as angel investors, bringing Sett's total funding to $27 million. Sett is already working with top gaming companies, including Playtika, SuperPlay, Candivore, and Cyplay. The company plans to double its team by the end of 2025, focusing on hiring the very best AI and engineering talent in Israel. Founded in 2022 by Amit Carmi (CEO) and Yoni Blumenfeld (CTO), Sett is tackling the rapidly expanding mobile gaming market. In a post-IDFA world, where Apple's privacy changes have limited user-level tracking, gaming studios can no longer rely solely on targeting to acquire and retain users. Creative content has become the new and most important competitive edge, both in marketing and for in-game content. To stay ahead, studios need to generate a constant stream of high-performing, tailored content quickly, cost-effectively, and at a massive scale, and it will only get harder over the coming years. By 2030, the market is expected to nearly double, reaching $180-250 billion, with an estimated CAGR of 10-12%. Mobile game developers spent $29 billion on user acquisition ads in 2023, and this figure only increased in 2024, signaling the need for hyper-tailored marketing content to capture audiences' attention. Most marketing and in-game content today is created manually, a time-consuming and costly process that limits scalability and pace. Sett's Agentic AI platform enables gaming companies to generate diverse, data-driven video ads and in-game content at scale. Unlike its competitors, its AI is trained on data from live campaigns, competitor activity, and consumer trends, enabling it to produce creative assets optimized for performance and ROI. This includes not only high-performing video ads that maximize return on ad spend (ROAS) for mobile marketers' user acquisition but also personalized mini-games and in-game assets. What sets Sett apart is its focus on high variability and its ability to introduce new creative concepts. While other solutions flood the market with similar variations of the same content, Sett's AI iterates strategically, refining content to identify a few winning creatives out of drastically different options rather than hundreds of similar ones. By automating and optimizing the performance of the creation process, Sett helps gaming companies save 15x the time and 25x the costs associated with the manual production of creatives. "Mobile gaming is one of the most competitive and fast-moving industries," said Amit Carmi, co-founder and CEO of Sett. "With rising CPIs and endless copycats, building a game is easier than ever, but making it profitable and scalable is a different story." "The key to success is unique content at every stage, from acquisition to monetization," said Yoni Blumenfeld, CTO and co-founder of Sett. "Our AI agents help game studios do what was once impossible: create and optimize content dynamically so they can stay ahead in an ever-changing market. Growing over 10x in a year purely through word of mouth proves just how much the industry needs this." "In all my years of operating and investing in companies, I have rarely seen such a no-brainer product," said Akin Babayigit, founder of Arcadia Gaming Advisors. "What's more, the team is truly world-class, and Amit and Yoni are generational entrepreneurs. If you are running performance marketing, not using sett.ai is simply irrational." Sett has quickly emerged as the leading Agentic AI platform for the Gaming vertical, a near-$200B industry even before the impact of AI," said Ariel Sterman, Managing Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "Under Amit and Yoni's leadership, Sett is demonstrating the overwhelming business impact that cutting-edge Agentic workflows have on even the largest studios in the world - across marketing, creative, product, and monetization. We all believe that Vertical AI is the next frontier, but the speed of adoption and intensity of demand have been eye-opening as to just how big the market opportunity really is." "It's not just about the high volume of creatives that Sett provides for our top games," said Noga Laron, CMO of SuperPlay. "It's their ability to explore new directions and consistently uncover winning concepts to double down on, that's what really makes the difference for us." About Sett Sett is an Agentic AI platform that empowers mobile gaming studios to create diverse, data-driven marketing and in-game content at scale. By automating the creative process, Sett helps studios reduce production time by up to 90%, optimize ad performance, and drive business growth in the competitive $100 billion gaming industry. Founded in 2022 by Amit Carmi (CEO) and Yoni Blumenfeld (CTO), Sett is backed by top investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, F2 Venture Capital Saga VC, VGames, and gaming leaders. The company works with leading gaming studios such as Playtika, SuperPlay, Candivore, and Cyplay.