Dan Kan, cofounder of autonomous vehicle company Cruise, today announced a $20 million seed round for Fifth Door, a new AI platform designed to let anyone instantly play and co-create games. Kan disclosed the investment exclusively to GamesBeat.
Fifth Door aims to redefine how games are made and shared. Using generative AI, the platform allows players, creators, and studios to build playable games simply by describing what they imagine—eliminating much of the time, cost, and technical complexity traditionally required in game development.
The round was led by Garry Tan (Y Combinator), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures), and George Bousis (Protagonist Ventures).
“AI is collapsing the barrier between imagination and play,” said Dan Kan, founder and CEO of Fifth Door. “Games have always been a source of connection and community, yet creating them has been limited to those with specialized skills. Fifth Door lets anyone turn an idea into a game they can share with friends, instantly.”
With the rise of social isolation and a decline in in-person interaction, Fifth Door views gaming as an overlooked tool for rebuilding connection. A 2024 American Psychiatric Association poll reported that 30% of U.S. adults feel lonely at least once a week. Fifth Door’s thesis: small, shared play experiences create fast paths to bonding, especially when groups can personalize games to their own inside jokes, traditions, or communities.
“Dan is one of those rare founders who takes a massive problem and reframes it with technology,” said Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator. “He helped shape the future of transportation with Cruise. Now he’s building a way for people to connect and create joy
together through games.”
Fifth Door is currently a closed beta in early access, with broader availability planned for later this year. The company will use the new capital to expand its technical team, deepen its generative game engine, and onboard its first wave of creators and studios.
Fifth Door is building an AI-powered creative platform that transforms ideas into interactive games instantly. The company’s mission is to democratize game development and expand the boundaries of human imagination.
“We’re creating a platform where anyone can generate games, and we’re starting with simple party games and then making them more complex over time,” Dan Kan said in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’ve got a game that we’ve generated on our site as a test. It’s a trivia-style game, and over time, we expect to expand that. We have a bunch of other games that we’ve generated, but we’re going to slowly release those as we feel like they’re ready.”
The ultimate goal is for anyone to be able to come in and generate them, he said.
“We found that with games, you can’t really have an AI game that works 90% of the way. You see that with other tools. You generate something that is pretty cool, but you still need domain knowledge to finish the last 10%. For us, we want to make it so that anyone can come in with no coding [experience],” Dan Kan said. “We really want to make it so that anyone can come in [and make a game] and publish it within five minutes.”
Getting used to AI
Dan Kan said his background is in making self-driving cars. He spent 10 years as cofounder and chief product officer at Cruise. He acknowledged that “ended a little tumultuously.” That was an understatement, as Cruise was derailed by a number of safety incidents and was ultimately acquired by General Motors with the aim of improving the tech.
Kan spent time with his family after leaving Cruise, and he noticed people were becoming more isolated despite having devices in our pockets all of the time. Teens and young adults reported becoming more lonely. Kan’s brother, Justin Kan, was one of the founders of Twitch and he invested in Fifth Door. And so Dan Kan was around games for much of his life.
“I was really excited about the intersection of games and AI and being able to create anything you want easily,” Kan said. “I interned at Twitch when I was in college, helping them with the first video game streamers, back when it was Twitch TV,” Kan said. “So it feels like it’s coming full circle.”
Fifth Door’s strategy is not so different from Moonlake AI, which raised $28 million a few weeks ago, and Bitmagic, which started even earlier. It’s a lot of competition among companies that want to democratize game making with AI tools.
Dan Kan said that the market for self-driving cars with competitors like Google, Cruise and Waymo was no different.
“Now it’s consolidating again,” Dan Kim said. “That happens in every industry, especially one that can be a big opportunity.”
Of the companies using AI to generate games, some are generating worlds, or game environments or non-player characters (NPCs).
“We want to make things that have value for other people. We want to make a game that you can play with your friends. You can customize the content. You can build it for your community,” Dan Kan said. “For us, it’s about making a real game. You can play it. There are strategic elements and you can play it again. Most of the things we have seen come out of AI are fun to experiment with but it’s not at the point where you can share something with your friends and play it together.”
Origins
Dan Kan started thinking about how to connect people more during COVID, when teams went full remote.
“We were a big company and we were trying to figure out ways to bring people together in a safe way,” Dan Kan said. “I initially had this idea where you create things that are not just for your team that are exciting and customized.”
His team was doing side projects and experimenting, and that’s when they saw that AI was right on the border of being capable of creating something with the right guardrails and the right mechanics. The guard rails aren’t easy to create without handicapping the creativity of a large language model, or LLM. Just like with self-driving cars, you cannot play for every car scenario that happens in the world. You have to adapt to the environment.
“Not everything’s going to be perfect from day one. So it’s the same here. We are training it, building the system so that it’s based on what we think people will use it for. But obviously, we’ll see when we start opening it up.”
The team can generate games now, but it will roll those out slowly, as they want the games to feel valuable to people. The team has just six people, so it has a pretty good runway.
“One of the great things about this type of platform is you can have an AI play your game that you created and tell you where it’s unbalanced or where it might need new things,” Dan Kan said. “Or you can insert AI into the game. As an example, the game we have on our site is a trivia-style, like Family Feud. We actually use AI to evaluate your answer, to feel to see if it’s semantically correct. Instead of being like exactly correct, you could figure out, oh, it’s like, semantically correct using AI in a way that you’ve never been able to do before.”
Dan Kan said he thinks the company was able to raise a lot of money through a combination of what it’s building. Like with self-driving cars, Dan Kan believes he’s taking an another hard problem, but it’s pretty exciting.
“You see people bringing joy back into the world,” Dan Kan said. “I want to do something where people are going to have fun with the product directly. In terms of games, I think there’s obviously a lot of investment. To your point, it is sometimes on the smaller side. In this case, people got excited by the idea.”
The game of the company, Fifth Door, is meant to convey an opening into another space, another world.
“We’re starting with trivia, but ultimately, this expands to any type of game. There’s no reason why game creation should be limited to game developers and studios over time. We’re seeing AI can create a lot of these things. The biggest hurdle is getting it that last 10% of the way there. And so for us, if we can start out with smaller games and create complete games and expand that pool over time, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to it in the same way.”
Like with self-driving cars, he said, you don’t have to start with driving around the world. You can start by going around the block or around a city.
“We plan to do the exact same thing. We want to be able to build any game. We’re not going to build triple-A studio games tomorrow, or a year from now, but over time, we want to be able to build a lot of different types of games,” Dan Kan said.
Cruise grew to more than 3,500 before it hit tough times — due in part to an accident involving a self-driving car and a pedestrian — and it was acquired by GM. At Cruise, Dan Kan started out as the COO and over time took over more of the product experience, design, research and user experience. In this company, finding the right people is critical again. So far, the team has more AI people, but not so many in games.
Dan Kan observed that many games are sequels that use the same mechanics as previous games. The teams are incentivized to create the same things they have done before, rather than innovate. They’re addcitive, but not necessarily fun.
“I think the bigger problem is that people who have ideas aren’t able to create them, and you need to democratize their ability to create. I think we’ll see a lot more exciting things come out of gaming.”
Justin Kan is Dan’s older brother. And while Justin was creating Twitch, Dan was in college and was able to help them out early and see how companies are run. Dan Kan has learned to focus on iterating fast and trying again.
“We’ve got to a place where we can build and iterate on games pretty quickly. We need to build more tools, more functionality for end users,” he said.
“We will see what people create, right? We will unblock a whole generation of creators to build things that they otherwise couldn’t have done,” he said. “It’s hard for me to say what games will look like, because I don’t know how people are going to use this and what they’re going to going to create, but they will be way more creative than I am.”
There are some who believe that any use of AI is immoral because it can take away jobs from other game developers. But AI tools are often meant to assist developers make games that they otherwise couldn’t make. This fear of AI seems heavy in the U.S., but not so in other parts of the world, which are racing ahead with AI.
“I think any industry is really looking at AI and how it’s going to affect it,” Dan Kan said. “You could put your head in the sand and say, ‘I don’t want it.’ But like it’s going to happen. So I think weve got to figure out how to work together with it.”