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Play AI has raised $4.3 million in seed funding round to build the middleware for AI models and agents in gaming.
The platform, which the Las Vegas company calls a modular chain for gaming AI, will equip developers with high-quality gaming data and tools, improve gaming content generation, and reward users for their gameplay through data contributions. Play AI is thus introducing a new monetization stream for global gamers, where they can now contribute and earn from their gameplay data. The funding round values Play AI at $70 million.
The company got going six months ago, and it has been building in stealth for the last three months. Play AI attracted the attention of numerous institutional investors, including P2 Ventures, Jump Crypto, Alphawave, Zentry, MH Ventures, Tykhe Block and several other investors.
“Artificial intelligence is the future of gaming and virtual worlds, but the cost and complexity of development has long been a major roadblock to adoption,” said PS Ramees, Play AI CEO. “By making it incentivized, simple, and secure to deploy, we are ushering in a new chapter for gaming, where any developer can easily add AI elements like non-player character (NPC) agents, auto-generated worlds, automated dialogues, and story trees—either by selecting from a range of pre-trained models, or by putting out a request to the network.”
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They are backing the company’s aim to supercharge adoption of AI in gaming. The platform uses blockchain to create a decentralized network for AI model training and data attribution. In an interview with GamesBeat, Ramees highlighted the importance of attribution and value accrual in the network, using blockchain to ensure transparency and fairness. On top of that, he said the company can use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to create a new source of earning for gamers, separate from the game economy.
Play AI incentivizes gamers on its Play Collective platform to share their gameplay data, which is then used to build and train AI models and agents based on the actions and engagement of highly ranked players. These are then made available on Play AI’s Gaming Agent Marketplace, making it fast and cost-effective for developers to introduce a rich range of AI models into their gaming titles.
In recent years, numerous gaming companies have sought to use AI to create more responsive auto-generated environments and NPCs that adapt to each player’s decisions. One crucial component in enabling this has been the availability of a marketplace to acquire real-world data from top players that can be used across games to optimize and personalize gaming narratives.
Developers currently rely on centralized systems to access data and AI models. However, these systems have inherent limitations, require high computing resources, raise privacy concerns, lack transparency, and are susceptible to censorship.
PlayAI’s ecosystem is designed to overcome these barriers and empower game developers with the tools to create immersive, real-time experiences that adapt to player preferences and skill levels— ultimately making games more dynamic and engaging.
Play AI’s offerings are threefold: Play Markets securely aggregate and validate user gameplay data and create a marketplace for gaming datasets; Play Dojo provides a sandbox for developers to train their gaming AI agents using decentralized compute and trustless evaluation; and Play Hub, an SDK to integrate gaming AI agents to be ranked and rewarded by gamers.
Play AI is further secured as an actively validated service (AVS) on Eigen Layer, where the Play Nodes will be deployed for the validation processes.
Play AI has launched the collective platform for users to share and earn from their gameplay data. To join the Play Collective today and unlock exclusive rewards, please visit Collective.Playai.network.
Ramees started out a few years ago creating gaming VR experiences for brands like Adidas, Prada, Walmart and more. That gave him a peek into the world of engaging gaming with good gaming content and personalizing online experiences for players. Then he started to focus on AI and combining it with virtual worlds. He happened to be a big fan of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One.
In the long run, he believes the world will go virtual and immersive experiences will rule. But first you need to build out these experiences with AI’s intelligence behind it to personalize the experience for every user, he said.
“Play AI is looking to build that technology in the middle where we can power these experiences,” he said.
The company has 14 people, split between the U.S. and India.
“If you look at the market right now, there are two ways to go about this. One is you create the game yourself. And you train the agent or the model or you get the data from that game itself, which is great. But that takes a lot of hours or even years to get it up and running. And it is just a single game. What we are doing is different is we are going to establish within existing virtual environments and games. And we are collecting the data, personalized user data from all of this,” he said.
This yields models that are targeted at users across aggregated data and multiple games, he said. The blockchain is important for attribution, or establishing where the player came from. Attribution is critical for the whole network, as it can lead to a reward for the source of attribution.
The company hopes to have a dashboard ready soon, and then game launches will follow that. He is targeting open world player-versus-player shooter games first, but the tech could work with simpler hypercasual games as well.
“It’s agnostic whether the game is Web3 or Web2,” he said. “We are starting with Web3 games because the team is more familiar with this kind of approach to starting networks. But our relationship with gamers is pretty straightforward.”
He said gamers will have a way to earn from the games they play in a way that doesn’t interfere with the game economy.
