game-studios
(6)
GameFounders bets on the studio - and the city around it
A game can be built anywhere. A games business needs people who know what happens next. GameFounders has spent its working life bringing those people to places still assembling an industry.
The Monster That Ate the Mint
METATHEORY sold characters in a game world before it had finished building that world. Then its founder learned a brutal little truth about rewards: people may chase them without loving the game.
Layer
Layer is a San Francisco-based AI content creation platform built for game studios and entertainment brands. It plugs generative AI directly into existing production pipelines so artists can generate and refine style-consistent 2D, 3D, video and audio assets at scale while keeping creative control. Model-agnostic and artist-first, Layer lets teams train custom models on their own art and export into engines like Unity, Unreal and Godot. It is used by 300+ studios and 10,000+ artists, producers and growth teams, including Zynga, SciPlay, Tripledot and Huuuge Games.
Bezi
Bezi is a San Francisco software company building an AI assistant that lives inside the Unity game engine. It indexes a developer's entire project in real time - scripts, scenes, assets, packages - so it can debug, generate code and shaders, build editor tools, and automate repetitive work with full project context. Founded in 2021 as a collaborative 3D design tool by ex-Oculus designers, Bezi raised $13M led by Benchmark and later pivoted to focus on AI for game makers, positioning itself as 'AI for building real games, not generating them.'
Volkan Gurel
Volkan Gurel is the co-founder and CEO of Layer, an AI operating system for creative teams in gaming and entertainment. An MIT-trained engineer who has built distributed systems and machine learning pipelines at Hunch, eBay, Airware, and Coinbase, he holds four UAV patents from his drone-engineering years. In 2023 he co-founded Layer with Burcu Hakguder to let game studios generate performance-ready images, video, 3D, and audio without scaling headcount or outsourcing. The company is backed by a board of gaming heavyweights including King co-founder Riccardo Zacconi, and serves studios like Zynga, King, and Peak Games.
Matt Booty
Matt Booty is the EVP and Chief Content Officer of Microsoft Gaming, overseeing content strategy and development across nearly 40 studios including Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King. A Purdue-trained engineer with an MFA, he began his career at Midway Games in 1991 - working on Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam - before rising to CEO of Midway in 2008. He joined Microsoft in 2010, led the Minecraft global team, and has since orchestrated some of the largest acquisitions in gaming history, including the $7.5B ZeniMax/Bethesda deal and the $68.7B Activision Blizzard King acquisition.