AI-powered gaming startup Volley received $55 million in a Series C investment round. Causeway Media Partners, General Catalyst, Amazon Alexa Fund, BITKRAFT Ventures, Y Combinator, Boost VC, Alumni Ventures, Waverley, Gaingels and Riverside participated in the investment round led by Microsoft's M12 Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
 

AI-powered gaming startup Volley

Founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman, Volley will use the investment to further its operations and development efforts. The company plans to create advanced LLM (Large Language Model) powered non-player characters, as well as a best-in-class speech recognition system. In 2023, Volley launched a gaming hub on the Roku platform and developed mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. The company mainly produces games for the Amazon Alexa platform. Each of Volley's games is controlled by speaking into a microphone-enabled device. These devices can be a smart TV remote control, smartphone or smart speaker. The games have an AI voice interface and are played with a voice interface instead of touch screens or handheld controllers. This makes games instantly accessible to a wide range of casual gamers.
According to Volley, the company's games are played in more than 30 million homes. The 20 LLM-powered Questions games released this year allow users to speak naturally using only their voice. Volley has also partnered with Amazon and LG Electronics to develop AI-powered games for these platforms. Volley's partnerships with Amazon and LG Electronics increase the company's capacity to develop AI-powered games. Thanks to these partnerships, Volley aims to further improve the user experience and bring its games to a wider audience.