Titan AI raised pre-seed to build inclusive mobile games with generative AI art

Titan AI is a mobile games studio using generative AI to create game art and levels, making free-to-play runner games for underrepresented audiences.

More than $500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Berkeley SkyDeck, with seven angel investors including Andreas Gross (Meta), Benjamin De la Clémendière (BlackoutLab), Yury Mazanik (Belka Games) and Bob Meese (Duolingo).

Co-founders Fabien-Pierre Nicolas (former VP of US marketing at SmartNews) and Victor Ceitelis (co-founder of generative AI startup Scenario) wanted to make games for people they love: Nicolas grew up with an LGBTQ+ parent and his wife is Korean; Ceitelis is LatinX born to Chilean parents who never saw his people as the hero in games.

Titan AI uses Stable Diffusion and DALL-E for 2D graphics, proprietary technology to combine them with 3D models, and is training AI to build easy, medium and hard level segments. It has shipped Aztec Spirit Run — a hero racing Conquistadores to defend a temple's treasure, reversing the plunder narrative — plus prototypes KPop Dream Run, Reptile Dream Run and Holy Bible Run: Jesus Miracles, with hundreds of AI-generated customisation elements like outfits and tattoos.

The endless-runner template is a decade-proven format, making it a low-risk testbed for AI-generated content.

Generative AI attacks the $250K-plus cost of mobile game art — the studio's core cost problem.

Underrepresented audiences are an unserved market: most already play runners, but rarely see themselves as heroes.

The founders' Scenario pedigree in generative AI for games gives the proprietary 3D-combination tech credibility.

Generative AI collapses the cost of testing game ideas: cheap content turns representation from a risky pitch into a portfolio of prototypes.

As of the 6 December 2023 report, Titan AI had launched Aztec Spirit Run and three prototypes with hundreds of AI-generated customisation elements, planned faster characters and collectibles like golden skulls, and was secretly experimenting with another game template beyond runners.