Gardens raises $31.3M for fantasy action role-playing game
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Gardens, a new independent game studio, has raised $31.3 million in funding so it can make a fantasy action role-playing game.
That’s a lot of money for a company that got off the ground in the summer of 2021 and has only 12 people. But the investors were impressed with the playable demo that the team showed off in March at the Game Developers Conference, said Chris Bell, CEO of Gardens, in an interview with GamesBeat. He started the company with his brother Stephen Bell and CTO Lexie Dostal.
Lightspeed Venture Partners and Krafton led the round, with participation from Dreamhaven, TIRTA, Rendered VC, Transcend Fund, Funplus and more. As far as game startups go, relatively few have raised such funding, particularly in a difficult economy. I can think of Believer, ProbablyMonsters, and Theorycraft. It’s a very small group, and they have a focus on craftsmanship at the center.
“We’re raising enough to kind of meet the vision for the project. This is an ambitious project we want it to be,” Stephen Bell said in an interview. “We wanted to be able to accomplish everything that we want to try. We wanted to provide runway and sustainability to the studio. I think it’s no secret you’re seeing a lot of studio closures. We have a responsibility to our team to make sure that we’re taking care of them. We’re going to be aggressively scaling up. We’re a small team, and we are actively hiring.”
The studio has also added several high-profile industry veterans to its advisory team, including former Microsoft chairman John W. Thompson, former Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton, former Tencent president Ben
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