Indie game development studio Welevel today announced that it raised $5.7 million in funding to transform procedural game development.
Bitkraft Ventures led the round for the Munich-based company. The investment allows Welevel's lean development team to expand its innovative AI tools that streamline game development and create dynamic, personalized gameplay, said Christian Heimerl, CEO of Welevel, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Welevel also announced plans to expand its development team twofold for its upcoming triple-A sandbox survival game. The project began development in 2021 using Welevel's in-house generative models and is set to enter early access next year.
Additional investors in the round include BMWK (DLR), goodwater, and angel investors Chris Carvalho ( a board member at Roblox), Daniel Weinand (cofounder of Shopify), Heiko Hubertz (founder of Bigpoint), Kun Gao (cofounder Crunchyroll), Mario Götze, Nate Mitchel (cofounder Oculus), Ralf Reichert (cofounder of ESL), and other games industry executives.
Heimerl said Welevel is building games driven by passion, not monetization. To compete with giant game companies, Welevel leverages AI to streamline production, without making compromises on quality and creativity.
The studio's AI technology innovates on world-building, NPC behavior, and quest generation, through sophisticated algorithms that make interactions tailored to each player. This system allows for adaptive storytelling where players' choices shape the world in unexpected ways, providing a truly dynamic experience.
"We are huge fans of survival games and open-ended sandboxes, but when we looked for a game in those genres that matched the scale of massive triple-A experiences, we came up empty-handed. Triple-A development needs a massive amount of resources and budget which both indie game studios usually do not have," said Heimerl. "Having used AI in my former companies, I recognized the potential it has to empower small, passionate teams to produce games."
He added, "In the past four years, our team has engineered tools and an AI platform that allow us to not just rival triple-A studios, but surpass them with a living, breathing world. With Bitkraft, we found a partner who shares our passion and vision. Our development process is unique, and with it, we can create the game of our -- and many players' -- dreams."
Welevel's debut game presents a shift for the sandbox survival genre by introducing a living world that responds, evolves, and challenges players in ways that have never been done before. (Of course, we'd like to know how it's different from something like No Man's Sky).
The company said the game surpasses traditional resource management systems by creating a dynamic relationship between player and environment. NPCs are lifelike, remembering the context of in-game actions, forming relationships, and assisting in player goals. Other conventional survival systems like building and trade are enhanced through generative processes, giving players greater freedom to construct the worlds they desire.
"Chris brings a unique combination of serial exits, technical depth, and exceptional audience understanding," said Jasper Brand, partner at Bitkraft Ventures, in a statement. "While it is a tall order for an emerging studio to take on triple-A ambitions in a large genre, especially in the early stages of AI adoption in gaming, we believe that lean teams who rethink development and break current limitations in time and scope will unlock unprecedented gameplay and distribution vectors."
He added, "Welevel, having established remarkable technological foundations over 4 years with only a handful of developers, is making creative decisions at rapid speed and marginal cost. Their fun, playable prototype already features extensive gameplay systems, high visual polish, and an experience that can capture players for over 100 hours."
Beyond the initial project, the team has plans for expansive user-generated content and aspirations to expand into other genres and settings. The company will be at GDC 2025.
Bitkraft Ventures is the global early-stage investment platform for gaming, Web3, and immersive technology, with assets under management totaling over $1 billion.
The long and winding road to Welevel
Heimerl started the company in 2021 in the middle of COVID-19. Before this round, he had raised about $1 million or so. The company has 12 people and it hopes to grow to 30 this year. But it's rare to find game developers in Munich, which I've noticed doesn't have that many game companies.
"There's nothing crazy going on here," Herimerl said.
He noted that Grimlord is there. Asked how he ended up being a game developer, Hiemerl said that he has been a hardcore gamer all of his life. He played the online MMO Ultima Online as a kid and he said that "ruined my school career." he remembers at the age of 13 or 14 that he played the game like "a madman." But that was the time when you had to pay for computer time by the hour. He cost his parents something like 2,000 euros. Still, he managed to convince relatives to give him money so he could play a few minutes at a time.
"There's no other game which touched me like Ultima Online. That just had this flare. I still can hear the music from the main menu," he said.
He managed to avoid addiction to World of Warcraft. And he was able to build and sell a couple of early AI companies. Fast forward to COVID, and Heimerl had sold one of his companies. He was sitting at home doing nothing.
"I was chatting with friends and hanging out with friends online. And they told me that they got into buying new computers to play Age of Empires. So we bought new computers to play this super old game."
He added, "And if you have a brand new computer at home, you do not shut it down after playing two hours with friends playing Age of Empires. So then I was thinking, 'Hey, what do I play now?'"
He tried shooters on the PlayStation but he was really bad at aiming. He went to YouTube a lot to learn how to shoot. And he was distracted by people posting Minecraft videos. He started watching people play Minecraft, and he found it was super entertaining. Then he started playing Minecraft and discovered how fun it was and he looked at other survival games too like Sons of the Forest and Rust and Arc Survival. With Sons of the Forest, he found you played it for a couple of days and then it was over.
He tried modding the game but didn't really succeed. Then he discovered City Skylines, a city builder sim game. He pour a couple of thousand hours into it and did modding for it. he joined communities on Reddit and Facebook and talked a lot about survival games and RPGs.
He said, "People were constantly chopping down 2,000 trees or 10,000 trees. And you know you only enjoy chopping down 20 or 30 trees. You build these beautiful towns and buildings, but in the end it's a ghost town. I thought it would be an amazing combination having villagers also living in your survival town that you actually build, while also gathering resources. Just living there and bringing life into your ghost town. That was the overall idea."
A friend told him it was the stupidest idea he had ever heard. The friend told him he would need a massive amount of money, as if he were building a triple-A game. The firend said to start with a mobile game instead.
"But my purpose was not mainly doing business in the game industry," he said. "My vision was more like I wanted to do this game, not just making a profit."
The friend kept saying he needed a lot of money to do this. Remembering his AI companies, including one that was a travel recommendation engine, he thought about AI solutions.
Being in Munich, he had had a terrible time before trying to find programmers who knew the Unreal game engine. And so he turned to AI. He saw AI was becoming better and better. When generative AI took off, he explored the technologies and decided the big point was not having the best AI model.
"The main point is that you have a system which can just work with a lot of tools. You have a very clear vision on how things are working and how things are attached," he said.
Gaming people told him his project made no sense. He became convinced such people would never change because they were so stuck on the old ways. They wrote off AI. In the meantime, he started teaching Unreal Engine at universities. He found people who were interested in Unreal and were young enough to consider new tools.
"That's where we started bringing talent into the company," he said.
Soon enough, the company figured out how to generate new things automatically, including stories, villages, NPCs, the context of the world and more.
The game will be a multiplayer cross-platform title where you can player with other people and bring someone else's city and villagers into your game. Heimerl said the game is about 70% doen and the team is producing more content and polishing it. They're leveraging AI to produce more, and they have started testing the game with other players. A public test could come in the second half of the year.
And now hiring talent is getting easier, Heimerl said. And with $5.7 million in the bank, it could get even easier.
"Maybe people can build cheap AI games, making dreams come true with a small game," he said. "That's pretty much where we're coming from."
