Believer, a new approach to gaming, raises $55M from Lightspeed, A16Z, and more
techcrunch.comGaming is at a crossroads these days: a decades-old business that has had remarkable staying power banked around classic concepts is now engaged in a battle royale with innovations in areas like mixed reality, AI, blockchain, and networking, as it strives to connect with an increasingly fragmented consumer base.
Today, a startup is announcing $55 million in funding from some big-name backers to mark its own approach on the field. Believer, founded by ex-Riot execs Michael Chow and Steven Snow, is still in stealth and it isn’t likely to launch anything for 3-5 years, the founders tell me. But it has very big ambitions to take on the big players and bring something new into the mix in particular in large multi-player “open world” games.
“We believe that the open world genre has been capped by a single-player, boxed-product focus,” said Snow, its chief product officer, as part of an emailed interview with the two co-founders. “We love these games; adventuring in Ancient Egypt or a near-future dystopia is awesome! But it’s time we started having these adventures with our friends.”
It will be doing this with some impressive backing. Lightspeed Venture Partners is leading the Series A, with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) also participating; alongside this, Bitkraft Ventures, Riot Games, 1Up Ventures, Don Thompson’s Cleveland Avenue, and Michael D. Eisner’s Tornante Company are among those in a previously undisclosed seed round. It’s not disclosing valuation at this time, the two co-founders told me.
Believer at its heart describes itself as a studio, and the money will go initially picking up more talent to fill that out, complementing initial hires that include CTO Landon McDowell (Microsoft, Riot Games, Linden Lab), CCO Jeremy
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