The $176 billion global video games industry is booming, but designing and building a game remains an intensive, technical challenge. UK startup TILKI wants to change that by allowing anyone to create high-quality, interactive experiences without programming knowledge.
To bring this vision to life, TILKI has secured $2.2 million in a pre-seed funding round, led by Twin Path Ventures, with participation from Atlas AI^VB Fund I (Atlas sgr), XTX Ventures, and SFC Capital.
The investment will accelerate the rollout of TILKI’s AI-first game creation platform, which generates immersive, dynamic worlds that evolve in real time based on player choices. The company aims to remove coding as a barrier to professional-quality game design, opening the process to anyone with a story or idea.
How the idea of TILKI took shape
Game development has traditionally demanded teams of programmers and months, if not years, of work before anything playable emerges. TILKI’s 17-person team, which includes veterans from Atari, Sony, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Warner Bros Discovery, believes it’s time that changed.
The company’s origins lie in Barn Cleave’s, TILKI’s CEO, with experience in large-scale user-generated platforms, combined with Chief Scientific Officer Luke Robinson’s track record of co-founding 11 AI-based startups and his PhD in Quantum Computing.
They are joined by Chief Technology Officer Kasper Hunt, a systems architect specialising in advanced technology; Chief Product Officer Eleanor Stefanik, a creative writer and AI/ML expert; Chief Mathematician Officer Colleen Farrelly, with expertise in data analysis, machine learning, and neuroscience; and Chief Machine Learning Officer Siddharth Deshpande, experienced in NLP and advanced AI systems.
In a conversation with TFN, Cleave says the mission is simple: “We want to empower creatives and storytellers to embrace the potential of AI-supported narrative game creation. It’s the future of gamemaking, and we’re at the forefront of making its possibilities a reality.”
An AI-first approach
Rather than layering AI onto an existing game engine, TILKI is built from the ground up to work with AI at its core. Creators describe the worlds and interactions they imagine, and the platform generates them instantly, then adapts and rebuilds them on the fly, allowing for rapid testing and iteration.
In TILKI worlds, non-player characters act autonomously, and their decisions carry persistent consequences. An innkeeper might simply rent you a room or, under the right circumstances, set in motion a rebellion that cascades across the game.
What’s next for TILKI?
The funding will be used to launch a closed beta in six months and an open beta within a year. TILKI is also building a creator marketplace to enable asset sharing, collaboration, and community-driven development.
Looking ahead, Cleave sees an opportunity to expand who gets to shape the future of interactive entertainment: “We see a future where anyone with a game idea can bring it to life. By democratising game creation, we’re opening the door for entirely new voices to shape the medium and transform the global games market.”
