Seidr completes seed investment round to build next-gen games

Swedish gaming startup Seidr has concluded a seed investment round and raised an undisclosed amount to develop next-generation cross-platform games.

The Stockholm-based startup aims to maximise players’ gaming experience by creating multiplayer games that can work on PCs and consoles. Unlike conventional platform-bound video games, Seidr plans to produce games where players across multiple platforms can interact with each other.

Seidr was founded by gaming industry veterans Adam Schaub and Marcus Jacobs in 2022. Schaub had previously co-founded various gaming ventures and worked in notorious gaming companies like Electronic Arts. Meanwhile, Jacobs was the general manager of Candy Crush and helped build the franchise in its early days.

Silicon Valley-based investment firm Andreessen Horowitz — also known as a16z — led Seidr’s first-ever funding round. The company is a household investor in the tech industry. A16z explained that it invested in Seidr because it believed in the expertise of the startup founders.

“In getting to know them, we were impressed by Adam and Marcus’ deep experience building out high-performing game teams and scaling games businesses,” a16z wrote in a press release.

The venture capitalist praised Seidr’s mission to build platform-independent games. It explained that the future of gaming would be “platform-agnostic,” meaning that players would not want to be limited by platforms when playing games.

At the same time, a16z acknowledges the difficulty of developing cross-platform games, especially for mid-core and core games, which typically require developers to build and balance more complex game systems.

Cross-platform games are more expensive to build than regular video games because they demand thoughtful solutions for user experience, capable client developers, and sophisticated art pipelines. Seidr plans to implement mobile game development techniques to build mid-core cross-platform games more quickly and in an iterative way.

According to Seidr’s website, it is currently working on a secret game project that combines action, strategy, and social aspects of gaming.