Studio Atelico has $5 million in a seed investment round, which will be used to “back a team on a mission to redefine the role of generative AI in games.”
The funding round was led by Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital, which announced the investment via its publication, Air Street Press, on August 14, 2025. Other investors include Stanford computer scientist Chris Ré, Hugging Face co-founder and CSO Thomas Wolf, and Snorkel AI co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner.
Founded in 2024 by AI and gaming industry veterans from Uber, Meta, and Creative Assembly, Studio Atelico is building an on-device AI engine for video games, which the company describes in its own press release as “a toolkit that helps us and other studios bring AI-powered experiences to life without massive budgets or custom infrastructure.”
In addition to building this engine, Studio Atelico is using the funding to “build games that push past the boundaries of hand-authored pipelines.”
“We don’t mean ‘generate a few trees procedurally,’” the company explained in its release. “We mean reactive worlds, characters that riff off your choices like improv actors, stories that don’t just branch but bloom. This is the kind of gameplay we’ve always wanted as players, and now we finally have the tech (and the team) to make it real.”
Studio Atelico’s first game is already in development, with more to be shared “soon.” While the company itself hasn’t said much about what this game will be, Air Street Press said the studio’s first releases “will target high-growth mobile and cross-platform markets.”
In its release, the company also addressed ethical concerns around generative AI.
“Ethics aren’t an afterthought; they’re part of our foundation,” Studio Atelico said. “We’re working directly with artists to ensure fairness, consent, compensation, and collaboration are part of every step, from model training to revenue sharing.
“We’re choosing on-device AI when we can, partnering with creators who share our values, and contributing to open datasets that prioritize ethics over speed.”
“We believe creativity should be amplified, not replaced,” the company added.