LocusX announced today that it has closed its round of seed funding, raising CAD$3 million, or about $2.2 million. With this funding, the company plans to develop and launch its signature product, a gaming issues resolution engines that accelerates development by cutting down on debugging time. Diagram and Triptyq co-led the funding round.
The AI-powered engine aims to simplify and improve game developers’ bug-fixing pipeline and cut down on potential delays. It does so by offering a collection of data around each bug found during the development cycle, offering insights and specific data with each ticket generated. The purpose, according to LocusX, is to offer tools that help with one of the most frustrating, expensive and time-consuming parts of game development.
Francois Pelland, co-founder and CEO of LocusX, told GamesBeat in an interview, “I’ve seen game developers who were more nervous and anxious the night before shipping their game about a possible bug they haven’t fixed rather than the quality… Game developers are constantly fixing bugs. How do we reduce the time the developer takes to understand what the bug is? Less anxiety induced for that period and more focusing.”
Squashing bugs with speed and precision
While there’s no particular literature on how much time each developer spends on bug fixing, Pelland noted that part of the difficulty is replicating each issue in order to fix the underlying issue. LocusX uses AI to document the precise details around each issue while providing recommendations that could lead to better resolution time. It also increases confidence, in that it “validates, optimizes and exposes the bug resolution metrics to stakeholders with real-time performance dashboards.”
Pelland said, “The traditional way involves a lot of manual work, a lot of head-scratching. The game developers and QA team need to work together to identify the bug, verify the bug, and fix the bug. With our new engine, we enable this relationship between QA and dev by providing tools and AI insights that make the creation of the bug ticket automatically with all the metadata that a game dev needs, with insight and intel on root causes and potential solutions.”
Yan Cote, LocusX CTO, also told GamesBeat, “There is a lot of information from humans, source code and the game itself. When you look at this information throughout time, you can understand trends, establish correlations, and discover patterns that give insights into potential root causes. In LocusX, you can tailor it to understand specific types of problems, customize agents to speak to each other. The magic is when everything integrates together and provides useful information for the developer.”
Frederic Latreille, general partner at Diagram, said in a statement, “The gaming industry is entering a new era where efficiency, data, and automation will be just as important as creativity. LocusX sits at the center of this shift. Their platform tackles one of the most costly bottlenecks in game development with AI-powered precision.”