Mobile Gaming Developer Artie Raises $10 Million

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Artie, Inc., a mobile gaming company based in Silverlake, raised $10 million in a seed funding round to continue creating its app-free game development technology.

Investors in the round included Zynga Inc. founder Mark Pincus, Shutterstock, Inc. founder Jon Oringer and Susquehanna International Group, an early backer of ByteDance Ltd., the company said Feb. 17

Scooter Braun’s company Raised In Space Enterprises, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's investment firm Thirty Five Ventures and YouTube founder Chad Hurley also invested in the round.

Artie creates technology that allows developers to make games that can be played within social media, video and messaging platforms. According to the company, developers using its technology can circumvent app stores, which can take a 30% cut of a creator's sales to distribute apps.

Artie was founded in late 2018 with the original goal of building AI-enhanced characters for video games. The company later shifted its business model to creating technology for app-free mobile games. It plans to take a 12% to 15% cut of developers’ sales from in-game purchases, according to Dot.LA.

Artie said it will use the seed round funds to continue developing its technology and to launch a slate of games in 2021. The company said in a statement that it will eventually release its platform to all game developers.

"Consumers discover the vast majority of their content from friends and the people they follow, but games are the only kind of content that require you to go download separate apps,”  Artie co-founder and chief technology officer Armando Kirwin said in a statement. “Artie's technology completely upends this paradigm, allowing consumers to play high-quality mobile games the instant they discover them.”