Dragons, dungeons, and artificial intelligence: Latitude raised $3.3 M

This week startup Latitude attracted the interest of investors and raised $3.3 million of investments in the Seed round financing. The company creates games with infinite storylines with the help of AI. Its first product AI Dungeon is an adventure story controlled by text commands — this is what builds the plot of the story.

The competitive advantage over other text-based quests is that AI Dungeon is able to respond to any user commands, it does not have any limitations in the application’s architecture. AI can even react to phrases like “I’m upset” — and the character will respond with a relevant action demonstrating this emotion.

CEO and co-founder of the project Nick Walton notes that the integrated into the games AI “knows a lot of good stories and their patterns” and is constantly learning. This allows the development of unique stories that are not limited by the imagination of the developers. The well-known OpenAI text generator is also responsible for the development of AI Dungeon. Developers promise that the texts and storylines will be even more consistent in the next versions.

According to the company’s data, AI Dungeon has 1.5 million monthly active users. The plans are to create more powerful games and open access to the AI for other game designers. This will reduce the development budgets of AAA (an informal term for high-budget computer games) — from $100M to $100K. According to a representative of the deal’s lead investor NFX VC fund, Latitude is changing the game industry, creating a completely new genre of entertainment with the help of AI.

The computer games market is growing gradually, but steadily: experts expect that it will be estimated at $200B by 2023. Analysts see the development of this segment in the implementation of AR and VR technologies, but the introduction of artificial intelligence in the gaming processes can significantly expand the ideas about the game industry.