Storycraft -- the AI-powered game platform where players create, explore, and share their own interactive story worlds -- has raised a $3 million seed round.
The funding for the Montreal-based startup will accelerate the global multiplatform launch of Storycraft's multiplayer mobile game built on Google Cloud, which combines AI creative tools, online community, and social storytelling in never before seen ways.
Khosla Ventures led, the round, which follows an earlier $2 million pre-seed round led by London Venture Partners (LVP), and Signalfire.
Storycraft was cofounded by Andy Mauro. He's a longtime applied AI innovator behind Nuance's Nina the world's first enterprise mobile voice assistant, and Automat, the leading product recommendation chatbot (acquired in 2021).
With Storycraft, Mauro wants to create the Minecraft of storytelling -- a place where anyone with a story to tell, not just game designers, can turn their ideas into rich, playable experiences by working collaboratively with AI.
"Our early players have shown us that creating characters, worlds, and stories with AI is so much more than just a better version of a community crafting game," said Mauro, CEO of Storycraft, in a statement. "It's actually reigniting a creative spark players thought had gone out. We've had people tell us that it's helped them through writer's block, that they've picked up painting again, and even that they're taking less anxiety medication as a result of finding a new way to express themselves in Storycraft."
He added, "Players approach creativity through a lens of fun and low self-judgement when it's in a game. This results in some uniquely personal, and stunningly novel creations from players. Not only are they building a world, they are able to live the story inside it."
Storycraft combines:
* AI Worldbuilding Tools: Players use generative AI to create characters, items, structures, gifts, and even sky and lighting effects to give each world a unique feel.
* Social Gameplay: Real and AI friends can explore and contribute to each other's worlds and storylines. AI characters ask human players to make things for them, and players visit each other's worlds to collect the necessary resources creating a near infinite well of ongoing inspiration.
* UGC-Driven Economy: Players earn, trade, and showcase user-generated content across a shared multiverse. Storycraft is the first game where literally everything is created by players.
* Emotional Storytelling: Every world is a stage for personal, hilarious, heartfelt, or epic narratives. The AI acts as a Muse for the player to help them come up with ideas, but also responds to the details they provide, upping the creative ante like a true creative partner.
"AI enables anyone to be both a consumer and a creator," said Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, in a statement. "Storycraft introduces a new kind of social gameplay, where players can build their own characters and interact with them in their own digital worlds."
Since launching its open alpha, Storycraft has already seen players make thousands of worlds and hundreds of thousands of AI-generated characters, structures and objects. Many players have already spent hundreds of hours crafting multiple worlds across a range of genres, including cozy, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, horror, romance, sci-fi and many others. Fascinatingly, the vast majority of worlds are unique creations, not based on pre-existing IP.
The seed funding will support team expansion, product development, and preparing for the game's public beta launch later this year.
