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Layer, the AI-powered productivity tool of choice by the world’s top gaming companies, raises a $1.8M seed round by top ad-tech and gaming angels, and VC funds.
The creator-first, enterprise-ready tool for professional art creation, Layer AI, today announced the successful closing of their first seed round. Round included top serial entrepreneurs and industry legends like Jim Payne, gaming angels like Akin Babayigit, Michele Attisani, and Dilpesh Parmar and gaming VCs like The Games Fund, The Games Syndicate, GFR Fund, Laton Ventures along with other AI/Tech VCs and angels like 500 Global, Elena Silenok, Taimur Rashid. Additionally, the team also got a strategic investment from the US-based top art production and talent house Devoted Studios.
Getting to know the team
Layer, based in San Francisco, is founded by a team of passionate professionals with decades of experience in AI, Gaming, and Computer Vision. Volkan Gurel is the CEO, with a background in engineering and management from MIT, Hunch and Coinbase. Burcu is the CRO and served in multiple client-facing roles across multiple products from ads to game services at Unity & LoopMe. Kuo-chin, PhD is the CTO who recently joined bringing 20 years of experience in Computer Vision from Appen and XMotors. Finally, Mehmet is a self-taught technical artist and game developer who co-founded and sold Gram Games to Zynga in 2018.
The team strongly believes a compact elite team can outcompete larger players and will expand by staying selective and laser focused on gaming. They believe in driving significant value to many businesses is critical to their own success, whether they are garage startups or industry giants. They are now hiring for their founding team positions: https://www.layer.ai/careers
What makes Layer unique?
Layer is simply unmatched when it comes to seamless integration into art pipelines and intuitive creator workflows, providing a great user experience and productivity boost. As proven by customer testimonials and detailed case studies, Layer leads the race as the tool of choice for game creators of all skill levels whether they are just starting their journey or have mastered game development. Layer proves any creator can go beyond their imagination and experiment with brand new ideas and art styles. A lot of AI tools today focus on either general use cases and foundational model training, or offer standalone cool features but don’t actually serve the everyday use cases. Most of them are either too complicated or are not designed for multi-disciplinary teams and certainly not enterprise ready.
“Layer supercharges artist teams’ productivity by 240% and helps expedite the delivery of art to meet deadlines” says Production Lead, Games United
“Layer AI supercharged Tripledot’s art creation, 3Xing our production speed and elevating quality. By reducing our reliance on outsourcing studios, we’ve not only saved significant costs but also brought the magic of art production in-house. We’re incredibly excited about this technology and eagerly await further updates. VP of Creative at Tripledot Studios.
Creators not only can go faster but can also supercharge their imagination. “Our art pipeline is not only faster, the variations Layer provides has been super helpful in increasing our creative potential and exploring brand new ideas”‘ says the Artist at APPS Teknoloji. (more quotes will be available on our website by 10th of November)
Layer already empowers many artists to generate images based on their own art styles, allowing them to seamlessly iterate on these images through its premier AI-assisted canvas. Layer is the only generative AI solution that has been adopted by the teams of world’s largest mobile gaming studios. Layer has a clear direction in style-consistent output quality, speedy generation, and an intuitive interface that’s committed to solving game artists’ challenges using AI.
Volkan Gurel, the CEO believes “Just like Web 2.0, Cloud computing or mobile unlocked novel applications that beat incumbents and other startup competitors based on a great product experience, we believe the AI revolution will be no different. AI has unlocked many new applications that will be built on top of this new tech stack and we plan to win by building the best product experience for artists in the enterprise leveraging the power of all the great foundational models and tools released by OpenAI, Meta, Stability AI and others. We’re creator-first, enterprise-ready and will remain model-agnostic”.
What’s ahead?
While Layer is focusing on perfecting 2D generation in games for mobile, then AAA studios, the team is already looking ahead. In the near future, Layer will generate both spine and sprite animations from text, images and other animations and further expand to 3D workflows. Layer will also build integrations into non-gaming workflows like marketing and advertising.
Layer will continue its dedication to style-consistent output quality, seamless workflow integrations that empower and free artists from redundant workflow overheads. “AI unlocked many opportunities for gaming and we want Layer to be the easiest tool to get onboard with and the fastest to ROI “ says Burcu Ozcengiz, the CRO. Layer is already serving numerous top tier clients like Tripledot, Sciplay, Mag Interactive and hundreds of professional artists since launching in February 2023. Layer is also working to shore up their compliance program and will achieve SOC 2 and ISO certification to further cement the security and reliability of their offering for the enterprise.
“Being deeply rooted in game development we see pivotal changes coming to production with Gen-AI tools coming into play. We are not big fans of the idea of flooding the market with soulless content and Layer.AI sets itself apart by aiming to enhance, not replace, human artistry, liberating creators from mundane tasks. That is what we all believe in. We also like that their focus is on enterprise clients and their real needs for seamless integration into existing production pipelines.” – comments Maria Kochmola, General Partner at The Games Fund.
