Sequoia-backed Astrocade raises $56 million to let everyone build games

I’ve been playing this online dinosaur game called Apex Predator. 

It works much as you’d expect: You start off as a small, feathery compsognathus, and work your way up to velociraptor status (and beyond) by, well, being the apex predator. I know it sounds gruesome, but it actually evokes “Pacman with dinosaurs” and is even rather cute. It was also built through AI—with natural language prompting—by a creator called “nuvu” on a website called Astrocade, where there are thousands of games created by AI-fueled text prompts. 

“If you go into a classroom and ask ‘how many people play games?’ everyone says ‘I play,’” said Ali Sadeghian, Astrocade cofounder. “If you ask ‘how many of you want to create games’, 80% will say they want to create a game. But if you ask ‘how many of you have made a game,’ only one or two people will raise their hands. For a long time, it wasn’t possible. This makes it possible.”

In 2022, brothers Ali and Amir Sadeghian—both PhDs with prior startup experience—cofounded Astrocade after Ali’s work at Google Research convinced them AI would facilitate sweeping change to how games are made and played. Finally, in August, after years of building with a lean team of 13, they launched. 

Now, eight months later, Astrocade has about five million monthly active users, clocking about 140 million game plays each month, and hosts more than 75,000 games built by creators from 80 countries. The company has raised $56 million in new funding, Fortune has exclusively learned. This $56 million includes a Series A (led by Sea) and a Series B, led by Sequoia Capital. Other investors include Google, Nvidia, LG Ventures, Dentsu Ventures, and Conviction Embed. And the user base, yes, includes the classroom-aged, but mostly skews older than you’d imagine.

“The target user for this company is very unintuitive,” said David Cahn, partner at Sequoia. “Women between 20 and 40 are the best users. You’d think it’s younger boys—10 to 15, that classic gaming segment—but that’s not really who this is…In that sense, I think it competes more against Instagram, where it’s just a fun way to spend time.”

Astrocade is hard to categorize. I was imagining a Roblox-esque endgame, but there’s a better comparison, the Sadeghian brothers said. 

“We’re actually most inspired by YouTube, the way they nurture their creators,” Amir said. “We believe the content [on Astrocade]…in the age........

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