Anorak raises US$5 million in pre-seed funding
The entertainment technology company plans a creator platform for early 2027, enabling communities to make playable content around their interests.
Anorak, an entertainment technology business operating across London and Chengdu, has announced a US$5 million pre-seed investment. The round was jointly led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with Supercell and MTG also investing.
The company says the financing will support recruitment in both cities, the release of its initial playable formats and the establishment of a creator platform in early 2027. Its workforce currently numbers 20.
Starting out as a research project into generative video, Anorak is building a platform intended to make generated video react immediately to players’ decisions and inputs. It is developing its own inference technology, aiming to reduce costs, accelerate generation and give greater control over the results.
The planned creator platform is intended to let communities produce playable entertainment reflecting their own interests. Anorak says it already puts new playable experiments on its blog each week.
Chief executive Shaun Rutland co-founded mobile games studio Hutch, which MTG bought in 2020. Chief creative officer Jonathan Alpine was a founding Hutch employee and previously held the same creative role there. Anorak’s fellow co-founder Tak Fung, its chief of AI, runs the company’s Chengdu AI lab.
