Describe a game in plain language. Get something playable back in minutes - no engine license, no coding, and the source code is yours to keep.
Here is a fact that should make you pause. The people who founded Jabali have, over their careers, shipped games played by more than a billion people. They worked at Meta, Amazon, Zynga and Microsoft. They know exactly how hard it is to make a game that works, ships, and finds an audience. And their next move was to build a tool designed to make sure they never have to be the ones building the next one. That is either supreme confidence or a very specific read on where the industry is heading. Probably both.
The pitch is simple enough to fit on a napkin: you type what you want, and a playable game comes out the other side. Jabali calls its ambition a "ChatGPT movement for video games." The comparison is doing a lot of work, but it is also honest about the mechanism. ChatGPT did not make writers obsolete - it made the blank page less terrifying for everyone who had something to say and no idea how to start. Jabali is betting the same thing is about to happen to game creation, where the blank page has historically been a multi-thousand-line project in an engine most people never learn.
The company was founded in 2023 by Vatsal Bhardwaj, a former product executive at Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, alongside Dr. Arnav Jhala, an AI researcher whose work on game AI stretches back through NC State and UC Santa Cruz. That pairing - a gaming operator and a research scientist - is the whole thesis in miniature. One side knows what shipping actually requires. The other knows what the models can and cannot yet do. Jabali lives in the narrow, fast-moving gap between those two things.
The key word there is "from the ground up." Jabali's argument is that you cannot bolt generative AI onto a traditional engine and call it a day. The existing engines - Unity, Unreal, Godot - were designed for people who already know how to build games. They are powerful precisely because they assume expertise. An AI-native engine has to assume the opposite: that the person in front of it has an idea and not much else, and the software's job is to close that distance. That is a different product, not a feature.
Type a description and get a playable game back in seconds, right in the browser. This is the front door - the "just try it" surface where an idea becomes something you can click.
A desktop-class environment with adaptive AI agents, support for 2D, 3D and multiplayer, self-healing projects that fix broken builds, and full source-code access. Entered early access in October 2025.
A community layer for discovering, exploring and playing what other people have made. The loop closes here: idea, build, publish, play, repeat.
Jabali split creation into two modes because creators do not think one way. Vibe Code is for logic-focused builders. Design Mode is for visually-driven storytellers. That is a small detail that signals they have actually watched people make things.
The engine works with Gemini, Claude, OpenAI and Grok, and exports to native templates, Godot and Phaser - with Unity and Unreal on the roadmap. Jabali does not make you pick a lane. It uses all of them.
Read that investor list again, because it contains a small joke. Sony, BITKRAFT, and angels from OpenAI and Google AI put money into a company whose entire thesis is that you should not need any of their expertise to build a game. The people closest to how hard games and AI are to build are the ones funding the effort to make it look easy. That is usually a good sign about the size of the opportunity.
Former product leader at Meta, Amazon and Microsoft. The operator half of the founding pair - fluent in what it takes to actually ship and publish games at scale.
Game-AI researcher with a publication record spanning venues like AAAI and IEEE, and academic roots at NC State and UC Santa Cruz. The research half - fluent in what the models can and cannot yet do.
Around the founders is a small, senior team - roughly two dozen people split between California and North Carolina, blending gaming executives from Amazon, Meta, Zynga and Microsoft with AI researchers. The company puts the combined gaming experience at more than 50 years. It is a deliberately compact group for a deliberately large ambition.
Jabali founded by Vatsal Bhardwaj and Dr. Arnav Jhala to build an AI-native game engine.
Emerges publicly with a $5M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, joined by Sony Innovation Fund and Sapphire Sport.
Expands from 2 to 20 supported game styles and integrates multiple frontier AI models - Gemini, Claude, OpenAI and Grok.
Jabali Studio opens in early access with Vibe Code and Design Mode, multi-engine support, self-healing projects and full source-code access.
"Our mission is to democratize the creation of games - a ChatGPT movement for video games, which will enable talented creatives, game developers, designers, and really passionate gamers to make video games end to end."
"We are making a platform to democratize game creation and game publishing."