SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Campfire, which provides an all-in-one GenAI platform that enables the creation of the world’s first AI-native life simulation games, announced today that it has raised a $3.95M seed round from Y Combinator, FundersClub, Mercury founder Immad Akhund, gaming entrepreneur and investor Juha Paananen, Uken Games founder Chris Ye and others. The company is also launching today its GenAI platform for developers, Sprites, and its game Cozy Friends, built with Campfire’s own tools as a showcase for AI-native gaming. Available for pre-purchase as of today, the game had a 20,000+ person waitlist.
Cozy Friends is the world’s first AI-native life simulation game, in the vein of Animal Crossing and The Sims, which both became multi-billion-dollar franchises. Cozy Friends allows users to interact with and befriend AI agents with unique personalities, memories and emotions in a highly personalized and immersive gaming world.
“The shift to AI-native games represents the biggest advancement in gaming since the move to 3D,” said Juha Paananen, renowned gaming founder and investor in Campfire. “When I first saw the demo, I was pretty stunned. We think this technology will transform gaming and entertainment, and Campfire is showing a blueprint for AI-native games with Cozy Friends, and the toolset for any developer to do the same with Sprites.”
Campfire’s GenAI game engine Sprites lets developers build AI characters who can hold conversations with users and accompany them on online adventures, making games, interactive media and consumer apps more engaging.
The company was founded in 2021 by Siamak Freydoonnejad and Sina Zargaran, longtime friends who met at university. They started out making a multiplayer gaming platform for remote teams but after creating an AI companion agent during an internal hackathon in August 2023 and seeing a 5x increase in user engagement in their own games, they pivoted the company to solely focus on delivering this transformative AI capability to gaming and the larger entertainment industry.
“GenAI is sparking a paradigm shift in how people engage with content in video games and entertainment apps,” said Freydoonnejad. “Users can interact with agentic AI companions capable of speaking and taking action, embarking on emergent adventures across different games and apps while maintaining the context of your relationship. This makes the experience more social, more human-like, and much more fulfilling. People can go from playing their favorite game or scrolling their favorite app with these companions, to even confiding about their daily experiences. It’s really important to make emotionally intelligent and ethical companions and that’s our mission at Campfire.”
Remio VR is one of the first developers to deploy Campfire’s Sprites platform. “We knew we wanted to enable our users to create their own AI characters, but it wasn’t easy,” said Jos van der Westhuizen, CEO at the Khosla Ventures-backed social VR company. “LLMs alone don’t get you there – it requires a lot of custom work. With Campfire’s Sprites, we managed to ship our virtual pet companions in a matter of days to our user’s delight. This new capability will give our game a huge competitive edge.”
To learn more about Campfire and its Sprites platform, visit http://campfire.to. Download Cozy Games at https://campfirecozyfriends.com/.
About Campfire
Campfire provides an all-in-one GenAI platform that enables the creation of the world’s first AI-native life simulation games, in the vein of The Sims and Animal Crossing. Campfire’s GenAI game engine, Sprites, lets developers build AI agents with memory and emotions who can hold conversations with users and accompany them on online adventures, making games, interactive media and consumer apps personalized and more engaging. Using Sprites, Campfire has developed its own video game, Cozy Friends, as a showcase of what AI-powered games can be. Learn more at Campfire.to.
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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4f1be232-6b69-452b-8ae1-75d4578bf38f