A gaming technology startup that splits its headcount between San Francisco and Research Triangle Park has raised $5 million and is looking to hire.
Jabali, an AI company working to make video game development easier, disclosed the seed raise led by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from Sapphire Sport, Sony Innovation Fund, Canonical Ventures and angel investors from Amazon, Google AI, Open AI and Pinterest.
The money will go toward accelerating the product launch, as well as expanding the team. In an interview, the company's founders talked about how Jabali came together and what's next.
The founders are longtime friends with Triangle ties. Vatsal Bhardwaj went to Duke. Arnav Jhala went to N.C. State, where he later served as a professor.
While Jhala pursued academia, Bhardwaj built video games and platforms for 15 years at Big Tech companies. Since leaving Duke, Bhardwaj has built a storied career, spending three years as general manager and director leading AWS Game Tech for Amazon Web Services (Nasdaq: AMZN) and another three at Facebook parent Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META), where he was head of product of Oculus App Stores.
Bhardwaj has also had roles at companies like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA), Skillz (NYSE: SKLZ) and Sun Microsystems (NYSE: ORCL).
The problems his company is trying to solve have been circulating in Bhardwaj's mind for his entire career. But the rise of generative artificial intelligence pushed him to pursue a company examining the problem of how to build games easier “with a different lens.”
So he called his old friend Jhala, and they got started.
Jhala also has a long history in gaming, having been a teaching assistant in N.C. State’s first-ever game development class 20 years ago, back when Epic Games was a small company and the cluster was just starting to build. When he came to N.C. State as a graduate student, he had been interested in networking, attracted to the area by the presence of companies like Red Hat (NYSE: IBM) and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) in 2001.
Jhala had always been interested in gaming, but there weren’t courses at his school in India. After taking a few classes in gaming at N.C. State, “I completely changed my path,” he said. After getting his doctorate, he pursued faculty positions in Denmark and California before returning to N.C. State to manage its game development program.
That’s when he got Bhardwaj’s call.
Today, in addition to the headquarters in California, the firm has a small operation at RTP’s Frontier building. The plan with the raise is to hire in both offices.
Both Bhardwaj and Jhala see opportunity in the gaming cluster the Triangle is building, as well as talent coming from area universities and existing studios.
It’s a pivotal time for Jabali, which has had preliminary conversations with developers, from hobbyists to AAA studios. Now that it has an understanding of the needs, the plan is to use the next several months to hunker down and build. Later this year, the company expects to engage with developers again for higher-level conversations.
But building requires a savvy team. Right now the company has six people, split between California and North Carolina. But the plan is to bulk up, one technologist at a time.
