Mudstack raises $4M to manage assets for game devs

Veteran game entrepreneur James Gwertzman has joined Mudstack as CEO and the startup has raised $4 million to help game developers manage their assets.

The Seattle-based company provides file versioning and asset management tools for the game industry, helping artists, developers and producers manage their assets and collaborate more easily, said Gwertzman, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“I care so passionately about this problem space. And they’ve got a really good product at this point. They’ve already got a couple of big deals. So I signed on as CEO back in May, and my first task was to go raise money,” Gwertzman said.

Gwertzman previously served as a partner for game investments at Andreessen Horowitz and he was the CEO of Playfab, a backend services company that he sold to Microsoft.

This latest round of funding will be instrumental in accelerating Mudstack’s mission to streamline production workflows and enhance collaboration within game development teams.

Gwertzman has a strong track record of building innovative tools and infrastructure for games.

“I am incredibly excited to join Mudstack at such a pivotal time in its growth,” said Gwertzman. “It’s crazy to me that our industry is so mature, yet basic tools for managing content and production pipelines are still lacking. I’ve wanted to build an ‘operating system for game studios’ for a long time, and am thrilled to be working with this talented team to deliver on that vision.”

“We couldn’t be happier to have James join us,” said Jordan Stevens, cofounder of Mudstack, and former CEO, in a statement. “He is truly the dream partner to lead Mudstack into the future vision we both share, freeing me to focus entirely on delighting customers as the new head of product.”

Anthos Capital led the round with participation from Khosla Ventures, A16Z GAMES, Pioneer Square Labs, and Hyperplane.

“We are thrilled to invest in Mudstack because we see a massive opportunity here,” said Zack Zaharis, partner at Anthos Capital, in a statement. “The game development process is becoming increasingly complex, and Mudstack is perfectly positioned to become the go-to solution for teams needing robust, intuitive tools to streamline that process. With James Gwertzman at the helm, we are confident that Mudstack is poised to become an indispensable tool for game developers worldwide.”

In addition, Mudstack has recently signed its first two large enterprise customers, Metacore and Paradox Studios, marking a significant milestone in its growth.

“Mudstack has saved us a significant amount of time spent managing our game assets,” said Petter Lyndh, managing art director at Paradox Studios, in a statement. “It’s also simple enough for artists to use without training, which will make it easy for us to roll it out across more of our internal studios.”
Mudstack will use the newly secured funds to further develop its platform, grow its team, and expand its customer base to meet the ever-evolving demands of the game industry.

Background

Gwertzman has enjoyed success selling his company Playfab to Microsoft and then taking a position running the Azure gaming group at Microsoft. He started working with all the Microsoft first-party studios at Microsoft just as the pandemic hit. The challenge was shifting the studios to remote development and how tough the process of building games became with millions of files in a variety of places.

“They became very difficult to manage, and it often takes a long time to synchronize the data,” he said. “People were really just struggling and there was no good solution for organizing for organizing and managing all the content and files needed to build games.”

Then Gwertzman left to become a partner at Andreessen Horowitz in 2021. While there, Gwertzman came up with a thesis of the kind of companies he wante to invest in, and Mudstack was the one that emerged as the only company doing what he envisioned.

“Mudstack is a company that was basically doing file versioning for art. You can almost think of it like GitHub for art. And so I was very interested in and I took a very hard look at it and almost invested but in the end, thought it was a little bit too early. And so I passed and then I kept in touch with the company,” Gwertzman said.

Gwertzman even wrote white papers on the topic. Then he left A16z in January 2023 in part because he missed being an operator. He thought of starting his own company to go after the opportunity but never did so and traveled the world instead and built a cool Burning Man installation. At GDC in 2024, Gwertzman went to GDC and caught up with Stevens.

“I was really impressed with the progress they had made,” Gwertzman said.

Gwertzman showed Stevens his white paper and Stevens was fired up by Gwertzman’s vision and asked him to be CEO of Mudstack. Gwertzman did some research and felt like this should be his next thing.

Upcoming tasks

The next task is to build a go-to-market process and sign up more companies.

“Paradox started using us for just one of their studios, and it went so well they’re now using this across all their studios,” Gwertzman said.

Metacore in Helsinki is also using it to handle all the files, versioning, approvals and workflow for all their art files.

“Our vision for the future is to become the GitHub for games,” Gwertzman said. “And I really do want to have not just all the versioning and management and tracking and storage of files. But like GitHub, I also want to tackle build automation and build pipelines so that we can start from the time an artist creates a file in, say, Photoshop, to the time it actually goes into the finished game. There’s a lot of intermediary steps that can be automated. And one of the things that I found [in past work] was the best studios are all automating their build processes.”

The category of tech is called continuous integration. AI will play a role in this in the future.

“It’s a big trend, and there are no really good tools out there to help with that in the game space. And so that’s what Mudstack is going to be. We’re going to be providing automation,” he said.

Sorting out the competition

I mentioned I was confused at all the backend support companies. Playfab, under Microsoft, was going after the runtime part of the backend space. That was all the tools needed to run a game after it was already launched. Others in that space included Pragma and Accelbyte and others. Perforce is a competitor, but Gwertzman noted it is built for source code, not necessarily games themselves. Gwertzman also feels like this space should be independent of a game engine, as some developers don’t like the idea of being locked into a game engine.

“This is the great unsolved problem of the game industry. Studios have all these millions and millions of files to build the game, and there are no really good tools to manage and version them effectively,” Gwertzman said.

The team has five people today and it is growing.

“One of the reasons why I’m so excited about Mudstack is I do consider myself an artist these days, and I’m actually very familiar with the problems that artists have, managing all the content with these big, distributed projects,” he said. “That’s part of why I’m excited to be joining Mudstack as a CEO. I know how much of a problem this is.”