Regression Games, a US-based AI gaming and esports company, has scored $4.2M in seed funding. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) alongside participation from Andreesen Horowitz (that backed Jeeves and Lumos among others), BBQ Capital, Roosh Ventures, and a slew of angel investors.
Platform to test AI-driven games
With the investment, Regression Games aims to bring the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to gaming and esports. The company plans to use the new capital to grow their engineering team and accelerate the development of their initial platform to test AI-driven gaming, in partnership with existing games and game studios.
Regression Games plans to hold a private alpha test and tournament with players on its AI platform in the coming months.
Aaron Vontell, Founder and CEO, Regression Games said, “A lot more people are gaming these days, and there is a lot of complexity that goes into planning the NPCs and AIs that are used in the metaverse, online battle arenas, etc. The tools and platform we’re building for players to compete will also be extremely useful for developers who want to build AIs into their games. It’s widely known that existing bots in games are lacking, and we can do so much more than what is currently implemented.”
Rick Yang, General Partner and Head of Consumer Investing at NEA said, “We met Aaron through our investment in Instabase and are thrilled to keep him in the NEA Family and partner with him as he executes on his vision to build Regression Games into a platform offering opportunities for competition, education, and recreation for players of all skill levels. Regression has great potential to become a pioneer in the emerging AI gaming space.”
a16z General Partner James Gwertzman added, “One of the core tenets of our a16z games fund is that games are great breeding grounds for new technologies that will then find their way into all sorts of other industries. And Regression is a perfect example. What Aaron is doing — turning the creation of AI bots into a game — is not only fun in its own right, but will likely create new frameworks to simplify AI bot creation that will have broad applicability outside of games.”
Competitive gaming with AI
With over 3.2 billion gamers around the world, the intersection of gaming and coding is poised to grow in the coming years. By 2028, the video game industry is estimated to be worth over $435 billion and an estimated 45 million coders by 2030.
Regression Games, the Philadelphia-based startup is the brainchild Aaron Vontell, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who helped create Battlecode, an AI gaming competition for students.
It is building the platform and ecosystem to make competitive gaming with artiificial intelligence accessible and fun to everyone. With Regression Games, players write code and AIs or machine learning models to control characters, debug strategies in real-time, compete for prizes in tournaments and top spots on leaderboards, and collaborate with friends to build the best bots possible.
Unlike traditional gaming where players use a controller or mouse and keyboard, Regression Games users will program algorithms and machine learning models to battle others.
The AI platform is made to integrate with both existing games and original games developed by Regression Games.
