The founding team behind Top Drives and F1 Clash developer Hutch has raised $5m to build a new company focused on interactive generative video.
Anorak’s pre-seed round was co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with Supercell and MTG also taking part. Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron is among the angel investors.
The startup is led by CEO Shaun Rutland, who co-founded Hutch before MTG acquired it for $375m in 2020, and chief creative officer Jonathan Alpine, who held the same role at Hutch. David Amor is COO, and cofounder Tak Fung runs the company’s AI lab in Chengdu, China. Anorak now has a team of 20 across London and Chengdu.
As we reported last week, Rutland has been teasing Anorak through his blog, describing it as a studio focused on “interactive generative video”.
Today’s announcement says Anorak is developing its own inference technology to make AI-generated video faster, cheaper and easier to create, with video that responds to players’ choices and inputs in real time. It wants to apply what it learned about developing Hutch’s car enthusiast audience to niche communities that would never justify a traditionally made game.
“At Hutch we saw how much a single passionate community can build around something made for them,” said Rutland. “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should – taste is the whole game.”
The $5m funding will go towards growing its London and Chengdu teams, which plans to release its first playable formats and launch a creator platform in early 2027.
“We’re excited to learn how playable experiments will be used in social communities in the future,” said Supercell investment director Jari Aalto.
