Anorak, a generative entertainment technology company, has raised £4 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC. Supercell and MTG took part, as did angel investors including Justin Waldron, co-founder of Zynga.
Anorak's medium is interactive generative video, in which generated video responds to user choices and inputs in real time. The team is building new play patterns from scratch, along with a platform to go with them. Anorak plans to bring this format to specific interests such as anglers and padel players, and to hand its tools to real-world communities so they can make playable content for themselves.
The startup spun out of a generative video research project and now has a 20-strong team across London and Chengdu. That team is developing proprietary inference technology to make generative video faster, cheaper and more controllable. Anorak is releasing new playable experiments on its blog every week and plans to launch a creator platform that will enable anyone to realise their ideas.
Shaun Rutland, the CEO, co-founded Hutch, the mobile automotive games studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, which MTG acquired in 2020. Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Alpine was a founding employee at Hutch and its former Chief Creative Officer. Co-founder Tak Fung is Chief of AI and leads Anorak's AI lab in Chengdu, China. The funding will be used to expand the London and Chengdu teams, bring the first playable formats to release and establish the creator platform in early 2027.
Every time making got cheaper – in music, film and games – value moved to whoever had the taste to filter the flood. Generative is the biggest of those shifts yet, because almost anyone can now create. At Hutch we saw how much a single passionate community can build around something made for them. Anorak is about giving every community that power: real people making playable things for the people they actually care about. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should – taste is the whole game.
Anorak is at the forefront of building a new form of interactive entertainment, turning generative video into experiences people can play, watch and share. What makes the vision especially compelling is the opportunity not only to build for passionate communities, but to empower those communities to create entertainment around their own interests. Shaun, Jonathan and Tak combine a proven track record in entertainment with deep AI expertise, exactly the kind of team we want to back at the beginning of a new technology cycle.
Most AI entertainment companies are using new tools to make old formats faster. Anorak is asking a far more interesting question: what does entertainment look like when content is made by and for a community, especially if we shift away from the skeuomorphism that other companies are still approaching the space with? Furthermore, the technical breakthroughs the team have made in the past 12 months make us extremely excited for what comes next with Anorak.
Supercell backs ambitious and independent teams, and we like this one a lot. We’re excited to learn how playable experiments will be used in social communities in the future, and we can’t wait to follow along as they create something we haven’t seen before.
