San Francisco, CA - August 2025 - Studio Atelico, founded by Piero Molino, Paul Szerlip, JP Chen, and Ennio De Nucci, has secured $5 million in seed funding to build a new generation of AI-first games and launch the Atelico Engine - a development platform that brings generative AI directly into the heart of gameplay. The round was led by Air Street Capital, with participation from notable AI leaders and gaming veterans including Chris Ré, Thomas Wolf, and Alex Ratner.

A Shift From Static Content to Living Game Worlds

The founding team brings deep experience in both advanced AI research and AAA game development. Their goal isn’t just to add AI “features” to existing game structures, but to redesign the structure entirely. That means NPCs that remember past actions and evolve, quests that generate dynamically based on player decisions, and worlds that expand and change in real time - not pre-scripted.

With the Atelico Engine, developers can build and run those experiences on-device, without relying on latency-heavy cloud APIs. This opens up new types of games that are impossible to build with current engines or modded GPT plug-ins.

And this is where the real lesson for founders lies: Studio Atelico didn’t start by following the AI hype curve. They started by asking a painfully honest question - what would have to exist to make games fundamentally better, not incrementally different? That framing led them to build an enabling platform, not just another title. There’s a massive insight buried there: true defensibility comes from solving the enabling problem nobody else bothers to tackle. By building the layer underneath the creative tools - the AI-native substrate - they’re creating space for hundreds of games to exist, not just one. It’s the difference between being a great studio and becoming foundational to an entirely new creative ecosystem.

What the Funding Will Fuel

With the seed round now closed, Studio Atelico plans to:

• Release its first internally developed AI-first title to showcase the capabilities of the engine
  
• Expand its engineering and design teams in San Francisco and London
  
• Launch a private beta of the Atelico Engine for external developers
  
• Build collaborations with mid-sized and indie studios who want to experiment with generative gameplay
  

Why Investors Are Excited About the Timing

Many early attempts at AI-generated games rely on cloud-hosted language models, which introduce latency, recurring costs, and uncontrollable responses. Studio Atelico is taking the opposite approach - deploying optimized, controllable models directly to the device. This gives creators tight control over game logic and emergent behavior while keeping operating costs low and performance smooth.

Investors see that as a structural advantage, not just a product feature. It means Atelico isn’t just building playable demos - they’re creating a platform that could become the standard for generative gameplay in mobile, console and PC development.

Looking Ahead

Over the next 12 months, Studio Atelico intends to:

• Complete its first public gameplay reveal
  
• Expand the capabilities of the Atelico Engine for real-time quest generation
  
• Release toolkits that empower third-party developers to build AI-native experiences without deep LLM expertise
  
• Grow its internal AI research team to explore new narrative and behavioral models
  

Studio Atelico is not simply adding AI into games - it’s rebuilding the medium so intelligence is part of the terrain, not an overlay. In an industry where everything can look like an incremental improvement, this is one of the rare moves aimed at creating the next platform shift.