Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
XFuzzyBot Raises $3.5 Million to Make Games Without Burning Out Workers
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Game development can be a grueling task, with designers and engineers working inhumanly long hours to ship games on tight deadlines.
The process is known as crunch, and up until recently, it's been accepted as a necessary evil in the gaming industry -- with triple-A studios justifying the workload with high-selling titles, like Treyarch's "Call of Duty" series or Naughty Dog's "The Last of Us II," which saw employees working more than 12 hours per day.
After years of working at EA Games and its subsidiary DICE, the founders of FuzzyBot Games decided the industry needed to do away with crunch for good.
FuzzyBot Games raised a $3.5 million seed round largely from European investors, it said this week. The funds will be used to begin making its first game, this time with as little crunch as possible.
CEO Tatyana Dyshlova said in a statement that FuzzyBot is trying to do away with the "inflexible high-crunch culture" that most big-name game studios have.
Dyshlova's co-founder and creative director Max Spielberg, worked with her at DICE. FuzzyBot is a team of ten now, and Dyshlova said it'll use most of the funding to hire new developers and grow its team by at least five people.
Sensor Tower analyst Craig Chapple said the pandemic prompted many companies to re-evaluate work-life balance as people began working from home, and that included game developers.
"Development crunch has long been a topic of intense scrutiny in the games industry," Chapple said. "More developers have begun reflecting on best work practices as a result of an unforeseen shift to remote work, since the already complex process of creating games was suddenly upended and new wrinkles were introduced."
Chapple added that employees are more likely to stay in a job where their personal time is valued.
"The increased discourse this has created around crunch will hopefully be to the benefit of hardworking employees, but will also ultimately help companies retain talent," Chapple said.
FuzzyBot wouldn't disclose the title of its upcoming game or when it might release. The company did say it'll be a "long-lasting" title that will mix the combat and repetitive levels of a typical roguelike dungeon crawler game with the typical open-ended choices and progression of a life simulator game, like "Stardew Valley."
Berlin and San Francisco-based BITKRAFT Ventures led the seed round. Finnish investors Sisu Game Ventures and 1Up Ventures, based in Washington, also participated.
Sisu Ventures also backed Finnish company Small Giant Games, which was acquired by San Francisco-based mobile gaming firm Zynga in January 2019.
FuzzyBot is trying to blend two game genres to create a new one, which could either be a risky gamble or very rewarding bet. BITKRAFT Ventures partner Malte Barth told dot.LA he invested because he thinks the former EA team has the chops to shake up the industry.
"FuzzyBot's ambition is to synthesize a new games genre," Barth said. "When a games development company can succeed with such an attempt, it has the potential for significant revenue growth."
Isolation during the pandemic has caused gamers to look increasingly to multiplayer games that heavily feature a social component.
While there's no data for the new genre of games FuzzyBot is targeting, Chapple said subsets of it are gaining steam. Chapple said Sensor Tower measured a roughly 34% increase in players using simulation games on mobile devices during the first half of this year, making it the fifth fastest-growing genre by revenue.
During the first half of 2021, games like "Fortnite" "Roblox," where players can create collaborative worlds, drove spending. On iOS and Android users paid roughly $1.1 billion, driven by in-game purchases in the game.
BITKRAFT wants to go deeper into simulation. It's already backed other social-focused game startups including Manticore Games and Pocket Worlds. It also was an early funder of "Fortnite" developer Epic Games.
FuzzyBot chose European investors because the region values a healthy work-life balance, more than North America. EA is partly based in Sweden, and while working there Dyshlova realized that there could be a better way to make games than endless all-nighters, because the company focused on a no-crunch culture.
"There's a lot of game companies that came out of Sweden, it's a really creative country, but they have this really great balance between leaving work, and then being dedicated to their family, their friends and their hobbies," Dyshlova said. "We happened to connect really well to investors that are based out of Europe and share some of those values."
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Samson is also a proud member of the Transgender Journalists Association. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Faraday Future Reveals Only 401 Pre-Orders For Its First Electric Car
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Electric vehicle hopeful Faraday Future has had no shortage of drama—from alleged securities law violations to boardroom shake-ups—on its long and circuitous path to actually producing a car. And though the Gardena-based company looked to have turned a corner by recently announcing plans to launch its first vehicle later this year, Faraday’s quarterly earnings report this week revealed that demand for that car has underwhelmed—to say the least.
Among the business updates and organizational changes disclosed in its first-quarter earnings release on Monday, the company tucked in one startling number: 401. That’s the number of paid pre-orders that Faraday said it had received for its first production vehicle, the FF 91, as of March 31.
The paltry number is especially interesting given the context of the automaker’s rocky history. Earlier this year, the publicly traded company found itself in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is now investigating allegedly inaccurate and misleading statements made by Faraday to investors. Those statements, according to an internal review by the company, include misrepresenting how many pre-orders it had received for the FF 91: Originally, Faraday reported more than 14,000 reservations on its books, but it later emerged that an overwhelming bulk of those pre-orders were unpaid—with only a few hundred actual, paid deposits on the vehicles. (What’s more, nearly 80% of those pre-orders were allegedly from a single, undisclosed company that may have been an affiliate of Faraday’s, according to a blistering report by short-selling firm J Capital.)
Faraday’s earnings report also highlighted first-quarter developments including leadership moves, production partnerships and its unveiling of the first production-intent FF 91. The company noted that it had received a dealer and distributor license from the state of California that should allow Faraday to sell vehicles online anywhere in the U.S. It also signed a lease for a showroom in Beverly Hills, and is currently on the search for a second such location in the U.S. Additionally, Faraday Future’s second car, the FF 81, will be produced in South Korea in partnership with auto manufacturer Myoung Shin, with production slated to begin in 2024.
In terms of financials, Faraday reported an operating loss of approximately $149 million in the first quarter—up from a loss of $19 million in the same period last year. The company has $706 million in total assets on its balance sheet, including $276 million in cash. Faraday’s stock closed Wednesday’s trading at $3 per share—down roughly 50% since the start of this year.
- Faraday Future Plans to Launch Its First Electric Car - dot.LA ›
- Does Faraday Future Have a Future? - dot.LA ›
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Meet CropSafe, the Agtech Startup Helping Farmers Monitor Their Fields
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
This January, John McElhone moved to Santa Monica from, as he described it, “a tiny farm in the absolute middle of nowhere” in his native Northern Ireland, with the goal of growing the crop-monitoring tech startup he founded.
It looks like McElhone’s big move is beginning to pay off: His company, CropSafe, announced a $3 million seed funding round on Tuesday that will help it develop and scale its remote crop-monitoring capabilities for farmers. Venture firm Elefund led the round and was joined by investors Foundation Capital, Global Founders Capital, V1.VC and Great Oaks Capital, as well as angel investors Cory Levy, Josh Browder and Charlie Songhurst. The capital will go toward growing CropSafe’s six-person engineering team and building up its new U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica.
The nascent agtech company began in 2019 as a project between McElhone and his co-founder and high school classmate, Micheál McLaughlin. Growing up in the Northern Irish countryside, the pair developed an interest in technology, which led to ideas about how such technology could aid the agricultural communities they were raised around.
“We noticed that there was a lot of really new, cool technology coming into the farming market at the time,” McElhone told dot.LA. “But every single farmer in our area hadn't a clue how to get started with all this new fancy technology, because they would have to go to training sessions or learn how satellite imagery from NASA works. And farmers—their job is to farm, not to interpret data.”
The first version of CropSafe’s software aimed to bridge that gap. At its core, the platform is an interpretation engine that scrapes and parses through troves of weather data and satellite imagery to find the information that farmers need to grow and harvest more effectively. “CropSafe did that work for you and spots useful nuggets like, ‘Hey, there's blight in field no. 14; here's the exact location and what you need to do next,’” McElhone explained.
But the project, which began simply as a tool for friends and family in Northern Ireland, started drawing attention from users around the world; to the founders’ surprise, people began offering to pay for the service. “That was kind of a turning point—realizing it wasn't just our 200 people that wanted to use it,” McElhone said. So he packed his bags and moved to Southern California at the start of this year to try to build out the software in one of agtech’s hottest markets.
McElhone and McLaughlin now believe there’s a better way forward that would position CropSafe as more akin to a fintech platform for farmers: Because the software collects so much data on farms, it can offer insights into removing bottlenecks that farmers could leverage to secure crucial financing for equipment and other needs.
“If a farm is leasing three combines this year, with the data we have on that farm [and its] crops, we might be able to say: ‘Hey, if you lease an additional combine this year, we know that you will produce so-and-so additional yield and produce $25,000,’” according to McElhone. In an ideal scenario, CropSafe could allow the financing for that combine to be approved instantly on the strength of the data on its platform; the farmer clicks a button on the app, and the combine gets delivered the next day.
So far, McElhone is tight-lipped about partnerships in this area of its business, but said announcements should be coming this summer. The company is also considering offering farmers insights into the best times and places to sell crops, with CropSafe taking a small cut of revenues for the service. (The idea is that farmers would only pay when they see increased sales from using CropSafe’s insights, McElhone said.)
But the move to Santa Monica has already proven fertile for the company, which is planning to announce partnerships with other agtech companies that would allow CropSafe to act more as an operating system—one connecting autonomous tractors, weathers sensors, and other “internet of things” technologies to ensure better, more sustainable crops. With local startups like Future Acres and Abundant Robotics already operating in the space, CropSafe seems poised to benefit from Southern California’s position as a hub for agtech in the U.S.
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Cedars Sinai Health Ventures’ Maureen Klewicki on How Tech Is Changing Health Care
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Cedars Sinai Health Ventures’ Maureen Klewicki talks about price transparency for health care, the labor shortage crisis and emerging payment models.
Klewicki got her start working in the venture capital industry as the program director at the Techstars Healthcare accelerator. She then spent five years working at L.A.-based venture firm Crosscut. At Cedars Sinai, she helps cut checks of between $1 million and $10 million from the venture firm’s $100 million fund.
“There's one million and one problems right now Cedars Sinai is facing,” Klewicki said. The fund is structured in part to focus on the long-term future of the health care industry, but about half of it is focused on the immediate problems that Cedars doctors and staff are facing.
To get an understanding of their pain points, Klewicki said she talks directly with leaders of departments from nursing to surgery, asking them: “‘What are you thinking about? Where do you need help? And where can we find a company that we can plug in right now?’”
The pandemic has taken a toll on health care workers, Klewicki said, exacerbating a huge nursing shortage and adding more trauma to an already overworked labor pool. But Klewicki also says that the labor force crisis could be a thesis for an entire fund.
“Could you solve it through the use of smart robotics? Could you solve it through computer vision? Could you solve it through ambient scribing?,” she asks. ”Can you do things that make it so that nurses aren't spending 30% of the time logging things into the EHR?”
Another crucial issue for Cedars: keeping the cost of care down. One strategy has been keeping patients out of the hospital if they don't need to be there, and making sure they have a range of services at home. There are a number of different solutions that are being developed toward that end, Klewicki said, from teams that are made up of both health care professionals and tech entrepreneurs.
“You might see a team that is half-Uber and half-health care execs,” she said. “And so that's where I think you start to see these really cool combinations of technologists and people that know health care really well.”
Klewecki said recent changes in how hospitals get reimbursed have incentivized startups that focus on a “value-based” health care model that focuses on preventative care.
“Because that overall care team approach is what keeps the cost of care down,” she said “And so you see a lot of movement from VC-backed and private equity-backed companies in the value-based care space because that's where the payment models are moving.”
That might mean setting up urgent care facilities in different neighborhoods, sending providers to aid patients at home or focusing more on telemedicine rather than bringing patients to hospitals.
Klewicki added, “If you do it right, you can have a very valuable company that is improving outcomes for patients.”
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Engagement Fellow Joshua Letona contributed to this post.
- Wavemaker 360 Health Announces $100 Million Fund Aimed at ... ›
- Techstars LA Unveils Health Care Spring 2022 Accelerator Class ... ›
- Cedars-Sinai Is Using AI to Evaluate Stool - dot.LA ›