Apollo Studios, an AI-based game engine developer, announced on the 21st that it had secured seed funding. This round was jointly led by Kakao Ventures and KB Investment, with participation from Base Investment.
Apollo Studios is developing "F-1," a next-generation AI game engine that leverages AI technology to streamline game development and distribution. The engine provides a "Prompt-to-Game" environment, automating the entire game planning, design, development, and distribution process with just natural language prompts. This allows completed games to be released on various platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, and the web, within a month. Apollo Studios aims to use this technology to lower the barrier to entry for game development and create an environment where anyone can create games.
The existing game engine ecosystem has been closed, limiting the adoption of AI technology and limiting scalability. Apollo Studios' F-1 Engine combines a structure optimized for game data learning with a global standard open-source design, enabling continuous performance improvement and enhanced usability through user participation. The company explained that through this, it plans to address blind spots in the gaming industry where AI technology has not yet reached, and introduce a new paradigm to the approximately KRW 47 trillion global game engine market.
Building on this investment, Apollo Studios plans to accelerate development and release the first demo version of the F-1 engine in the second half of next year.
Apollo Studios is led by CEO Cho Sung-min, an AI trading engineer from Goldman Sachs. The team includes AI engineers from JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, as well as AI research experience from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Columbia University, and Cornell University. Some team members have experience founding and exiting startups, and are recognized for their technical prowess and teamwork.
“Apollo Studios is a rare team that possesses technological prowess, understanding of the gaming industry, and global startup experience, and has been attracting attention from major gaming companies since its inception,” said Hye-won Ahn, a senior judge at Kakao Ventures. “We expect them to create a new standard for AI-based global game development.”
CEO Jo Seong-min said, “Apollo Studios is focusing on how AI fundamentally changes the way games are made and redefining the ‘language of game production.’ We will focus on technological perfection and global expansion to open an era in which anyone around the world can make and share games.”
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