Anorak secures $5M to let anyone create their own AI-powered games

Anorak, a London-Chengdu entertainment tech company with the vision of “making any pursuit playable”, today announced a $5 million pre-seed round co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with participation from Supercell and MTG.

Anorak is led by CEO Shaun Rutland, who co-founded Hutch – the mobile automotive games studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, acquired by MTG in 2020 – and Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Alpine, a founding employee at Hutch and its former Chief Creative Officer.  They are joined by co-founder Tak Fung, Chief of AI, who leads Anorak's AI lab in Chengdu, China.

The company, which began as a generative video research project, now has a 20-strong team across London and Chengdu, developing proprietary inference technology to make generative video faster, cheaper and more controllable, progressively enabling games and experiences to shift from pre-generated to generative, real-time interaction.

The company's medium is interactive generative video – generative video, made playable. Rather than simply prompting its way to new AI-bolstered versions of existing games, Anorak is building new play patterns from scratch, and the platform to go with them. It’s a platform where generated video responds to user choices and inputs in real time. The model pairs human creativity and playfulness with agentic ingenuity and visualisation to establish an entirely new entertainment medium; one that is playable, watchable, and shareable.

At Hutch, the team learned how deep a single subculture can run. Car enthusiasts didn't just play – they obsessed over details, built communities and held each game to their own standards. Anorak takes that lesson and applies it to every subculture there is: anglers, sneakerheads, padel players, birdwatchers, K-pop fans, and thousands of communities no publisher would ever greenlight a game for. 

Generative media changes the economics of serving these communities. Anorak will bring its interactive format to increasingly wider and specific interests, making entertainment viable for audiences that traditional game production economics have left underserved.

The aim is to hand those tools to real-world communities, so they can make playable content for themselves – shaped by their own in-jokes, rituals and taste, not a boardroom's guess at what a mass market wants. When anyone can make anything, Anorak believes taste becomes the scarce asset, and the communities that hold it should not only steer what is created, but become the creators.

Anorak is releasing new playable experiments on its blog every week, with plans to launch a creator platform that will enable anyone to realise their ideas.

It won't be a traditional chatbot that turns a prompt into a game. Anorak believes creation should be as much fun as playing – it's about having fun making fun.

According to Shaun Rutland, CEO and co-founder, Anorak:

"Every time making got cheaper – in music, film and games – value moved to whoever had the taste to filter the flood. Generative is the biggest of those shifts yet, because almost anyone can now create. 
Anorak is about giving every community that power: real people making playable things for the people they actually care about."

According to Harri Manninen, Founding Partner, Play Ventures, Anorak is at the forefront of building a new form of interactive entertainment, turning generative video into experiences people can play, watch and share. 

“What makes the vision especially compelling is the opportunity not only to build for passionate communities, but to empower those communities to create entertainment around their own interests. 

Shaun, Jonathan and Tak combine a proven track record in entertainment with deep AI expertise, exactly the kind of team we want to back at the beginning of a new technology cycle.”

Alex Brunicki, Founding Partner, Backed VC, contends that most AI entertainment companies are using new tools to make old formats faster. 

“Anorak is asking a far more interesting question: what does entertainment look like when content is made by and for a community, especially if we shift away from the skeuomorphism that other companies are still approaching the space with?

Furthermore, the technical breakthroughs the team have made in the past 12 months make us extremely excited for what comes next with Anorak."

The funding will expand the London and Chengdu teams, bring the first playable formats to release, and establish the creator platform in early 2027.