Anorak raises $5M pre-seed to build interactive generative video for niche communities

Anorak (London, UK) has raised $5 million (approximately €4.6 million) in a pre-seed co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with Supercell (the Finnish mobile games company behind Clash of Clans), MTG (Modern Times Group), and angels including Justin Waldron (co-founder of Zynga) also participating. The company is building an interactive generative video platform where content responds to user choices in real time — what the founders call "playable formats" — targeted at niche interest communities that conventional game publishers have never found economical to serve: anglers, padel players, sneakerheads, K-pop fans.

The founding team comes from Hutch, the mobile automotive games studio (Top Drives, F1 Clash): Shaun Rutland (CEO) co-founded Hutch, Jonathan Alpine (CCO) was its first employee and Chief Commercial Officer, and Tak Fung (Chief of AI) leads a generative AI research team in Chengdu. MTG acquired Hutch in 2020; MTG is now also an investor in Anorak, an unusual position that amounts to backing a founder who left a company it owns to build something new.

The $5M funds team expansion in both London and Chengdu, the release of first playable formats, and the development of a creator platform planned for early 2027.

Playable video as a new format category

The claim Anorak is making is distinct from both generative gaming and interactive video as those categories currently exist. Existing generative games use AI to generate assets — levels, characters, dialogue — within conventional game structures. Interactive video (choose-your-own-adventure formats) makes predefined branching decisions, not live generative responses. Anorak's stated aim is video that is generated in response to user input, in real time, without a fixed decision tree.

The technical challenge is speed: generative video at the quality level that makes the format feel like entertainment rather than a demo requires inference faster and cheaper than what current infrastructure delivers. The company says it is building proprietary inference technology to make generative video more controllable and cost-effective. That is the bet the Chengdu team represents.

The commercial target — niche communities that traditional publishers won't serve — is a sensible entry point precisely because those communities have high engagement and low competition. A community of competitive anglers or padel players is too small for a AAA studio, but it is large enough for a generative platform if content production costs are near zero.

Play Ventures, Backed VC, and the gaming investor signal

Play Ventures (Helsinki) focuses exclusively on early-stage games and entertainment companies. Its co-lead is a conviction signal that the generative video format represents a genuine structural shift in the games market, not a technology novelty. Backed VC (London), which also co-led, is a generalist early-stage fund; partner Alex Brunicki describes Anorak as "asking a far more interesting question" than peers who are replicating existing game structures with generative tools.

Supercell's participation as a strategic investor brings the perspective of a studio that has built mass-market games for two decades and understands the constraints of the dominant distribution model. The fact that it backs a company whose premise is to work outside that model — serving communities too small for the App Store algorithm — suggests Supercell sees the generative shift as opening a market segment it cannot serve from its current position.