Veteran recreation entrepreneur James Gwertzman has joined Mudstack as CEO and the startup has raised $4 million to assist recreation builders handle their property.
The Seattle-based firm offers file versioning and asset administration instruments for the sport business, serving to artists, builders and producers handle their property and collaborate extra simply, mentioned Gwertzman, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“I care so passionately about this problem space. And they’ve got a really good product at this point. They’ve already got a couple of big deals. So I signed on as CEO back in May, and my first task was to go raise money,” Gwertzman mentioned.
Gwertzman beforehand served as a accomplice for recreation investments at Andreessen Horowitz and he was the CEO of Playfab, a backend providers firm that he bought to Microsoft.
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This newest spherical of funding shall be instrumental in accelerating Mudstack’s mission to streamline manufacturing workflows and improve collaboration inside recreation growth groups.
Gwertzman has a powerful monitor report of constructing revolutionary instruments and infrastructure for video games.
“I am incredibly excited to join Mudstack at such a pivotal time in its growth,” mentioned Gwertzman. “It’s crazy to me that our industry is so mature, yet basic tools for managing content and production pipelines are still lacking. I’ve wanted to build an ‘operating system for game studios’ for a long time, and am thrilled to be working with this talented team to deliver on that vision.”
“We couldn’t be happier to have James join us,” mentioned Jordan Stevens, cofounder of Mudstack, and former CEO, in a press release. “He is truly the dream partner to lead Mudstack into the future vision we both share, freeing me to focus entirely on delighting customers as the new head of product.”
Anthos Capital led the spherical with participation from Khosla Ventures, A16Z GAMES, Pioneer Sq. Labs, and Hyperplane.
“We are thrilled to invest in Mudstack because we see a massive opportunity here,” mentioned Zack Zaharis, accomplice at Anthos Capital, in a press release. “The game development process is becoming increasingly complex, and Mudstack is perfectly positioned to become the go-to solution for teams needing robust, intuitive tools to streamline that process. With James Gwertzman at the helm, we are confident that Mudstack is poised to become an indispensable tool for game developers worldwide.”
As well as, Mudstack has just lately signed its first two giant enterprise prospects, Metacore and Paradox Studios, marking a major milestone in its progress.
“Mudstack has saved us a significant amount of time spent managing our game assets,” mentioned Petter Lyndh, managing artwork director at Paradox Studios, in a press release. “It’s also simple enough for artists to use without training, which will make it easy for us to roll it out across more of our internal studios.”
Mudstack will use the newly secured funds to additional develop its platform, develop its staff, and broaden its buyer base to fulfill the ever-evolving calls for of the sport business.
Background
Gwertzman has loved success promoting his firm Playfab to Microsoft after which taking a place operating the Azure gaming group at Microsoft. He began working with all of the Microsoft first-party studios at Microsoft simply because the pandemic hit. The problem was shifting the studios to distant growth and the way powerful the method of constructing video games grew to become with tens of millions of recordsdata in quite a lot of locations.
“They became very difficult to manage, and it often takes a long time to synchronize the data,” he mentioned. “People were really just struggling and there was no good solution for organizing for organizing and managing all the content and files needed to build games.”
Then Gwertzman left to grow to be a accomplice at Andreessen Horowitz in 2021. Whereas there, Gwertzman got here up with a thesis of the type of corporations he wante to put money into, and Mudstack was the one which emerged as the one firm doing what he envisioned.
“Mudstack is a company that was basically doing file versioning for art. You can almost think of it like GitHub for art. And so I was very interested in and I took a very hard look at it and almost invested but in the end, thought it was a little bit too early. And so I passed and then I kept in touch with the company,” Gwertzman mentioned.
Gwertzman even wrote white papers on the subject. Then he left A16z in January 2023 partly as a result of he missed being an operator. He considered beginning his personal firm to go after the chance however by no means did so and traveled the world as an alternative and constructed a cool Burning Man set up. At GDC in 2024, Gwertzman went to GDC and caught up with Stevens.
“I was really impressed with the progress they had made,” Gwertzman mentioned.
Gwertzman confirmed Stevens his white paper and Stevens was fired up by Gwertzman’s imaginative and prescient and requested him to be CEO of Mudstack. Gwertzman did some analysis and felt like this must be his subsequent factor.
Upcoming duties
The subsequent process is to construct a go-to-market course of and join extra corporations.
“Paradox started using us for just one of their studios, and it went so well they’re now using this across all their studios,” Gwertzman mentioned.
Metacore in Helsinki can also be utilizing it to deal with all of the recordsdata, versioning, approvals and workflow for all their artwork recordsdata.
“Our vision for the future is to become the GitHub for games,” Gwertzman mentioned. “And I really do want to have not just all the versioning and management and tracking and storage of files. But like GitHub, I also want to tackle build automation and build pipelines so that we can start from the time an artist creates a file in, say, Photoshop, to the time it actually goes into the finished game. There’s a lot of intermediary steps that can be automated. And one of the things that I found [in past work] was the best studios are all automating their build processes.”
The class of tech known as steady integration. AI will play a task on this sooner or later.
“It’s a big trend, and there are no really good tools out there to help with that in the game space. And so that’s what Mudstack is going to be. We’re going to be providing automation,” he mentioned.
Checking out the competitors
I discussed I used to be confused in any respect the backend help corporations. Playfab, underneath Microsoft, was going after the runtime a part of the backend house. That was all of the instruments wanted to run a recreation after it was already launched. Others in that house included Pragma and Accelbyte and others. Perforce is a competitor, however Gwertzman famous it’s constructed for supply code, not essentially video games themselves. Gwertzman additionally seems like this house must be unbiased of a recreation engine, as some builders don’t like the thought of being locked right into a recreation engine.
“This is the great unsolved problem of the game industry. Studios have all these millions and millions of files to build the game, and there are no really good tools to manage and version them effectively,” Gwertzman mentioned.
The staff has 5 individuals in the present day and it’s rising.
“One of the reasons why I’m so excited about Mudstack is I do consider myself an artist these days, and I’m actually very familiar with the problems that artists have, managing all the content with these big, distributed projects,” he mentioned. “That’s part of why I’m excited to be joining Mudstack as a CEO. I know how much of a problem this is.”
