Verse8, an AI-native platform that enables creators to instantly turn ideas into playable games, has raised $5 million in seed funding.
Since launching in stealth in July, the platform has reached over 3.5 million monthly active users across play and creation, supported by more than 5,000 active creators and 25,000 games generated.
The financing for the Seoul, South Korea-based company came from Story Foundation, Nexpace (the Web3 arm of Nexon), Neowiz, MarbleX (Web3 arm of Netmarble), Solarium Labs and Nexus, with participation from additional investors across gaming, media and technology.
The funding comes at a pivotal moment for interactive media, the company said. Generative AI is collapsing the cost and complexity of content creation, yet interactive experiences remain locked behind long development cycles, large teams, and centralized studios.
Billions of people create video, music, and images, but only a small fraction have the skills and tools to create games. Verse8 is built for this inflection point; making real-time, multiplayer game creation accessible to anyone.
Verse8 allows creators to generate fully playable, multiplayer games in minutes using natural language prompts without writing code, installing engines, or assembling large production teams. A single idea can become a live interactive experience, deployable instantly and accessible to players globally.
The new capital will be used to advance Verse8’s core AI systems, expand creator onboarding and incentives, and scale its publishing and distribution infrastructure.
Verse8 was founded by JC Kim and Kevin Lee, seasoned entrepreneurs with deep expertise in blockchain gaming, platform building, and strategic investments. Their backgrounds span pioneering blockchain at Line, founding successful startups with exits, and deploying $200 million-plus in gaming investments, shaping Verse8’s focus on speed, accessibility, and creative iteration from day one.
Jake Song, the visionary behind Korea’s iconic Lineage series and Nexon cofounder, serves as core advisor shaping Verse8’s AI-powered game platform
“Just three million creators globally produce interactive content, and the top 20 studios control 70% of all production.” said Kevin Lee, CEO of Verse8, in a statement. “Verse8 changes that dynamic. By compressing the tools of a full game studio into a single prompt, we make interactive creation accessible to all creators. This funding allows us to deepen the technology and scale an ecosystem where creativity compounds rather than resets.”
Reimagining interactive media creation
Game development today is capital- and labor-intensive. Production typically requires long cycles, multidisciplinary teams, and budgets that can reach tens of millions of dollars, concentrating creative and economic power among a few studios. Verse8 reduces these barriers by allowing creators to transform text prompts into live, shared worlds in minutes, enabling experimentation and creativity at scale.
“AI is collapsing the cost of creation across every media format, but games have been the last holdout,” said S.Y. Lee, CEO of Story Foundation, in a statement. “Verse8 is attacking the hardest part of that problem; “compressing months of development and millions in capital into minutes of natural language prompting, and doing it in a way that aligns creators, IP holders, and distribution from day one. We believe this marks the beginning of a new creation stack for interactive media, with Verse8 at its center.”
Verse8 automates art, code, design, and QA while enabling continuous iteration and deployment. Integration with Story provides on-chain ownership, licensing, and distribution, allowing creators to retain credit, earn revenue, and safely remix existing IP.
Verse8 believes this approach lays the groundwork for a new category of creator-led, AI-native interactive media, with games representing the first scalable use case of a broader shift in how digital content is created, owned, and distributed.
The company has 20 people. I asked Verse8 about the criticism toward generative AI in gaming.
A spokesperson for the company said in a statement, “The criticism toward generative AI in gaming is legitimate. When major studios use AI to quietly replace artists or cut production costs without accountability, that erodes trust across the entire industry. We understand why gamers and developers are frustrated.”
“But that’s not what Verse8 is,” the spokesperson added. “Our platform exists to lower the barrier to creation, not to automate away the people who create. The reality of the games industry today is that a handful of large studios control the overwhelming majority of what gets made. Verse8 is built on the premise that this shouldn’t be the case. Anyone with a vision should have the tools to bring it to life.”
And the spokesperson said, “On copyright: at the foundation, we operate in full compliance with the copyright policies of the underlying LLMs we work with. But we’re going further than that. Through our partnership and strategic investment from Story Protocol, we’re building a structure where original creators can register their IP on-chain, allow others to build on it through Verse8, and share in the value that gets created — transparently and verifiably.”