Clockwork Labs announced that it had raised $22 million in a funding round to fund the development of BitCraft, its community sandbox multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG.
VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) led the round, while Roblox founder and CEO, David Baszucki, participated in the round as a private investor. In addition to A16z and Baszucki, major gaming companies and investors such as Supercell, Unity co-founder David Helgason, and CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson also participated in the round.
“We set out to make the game, and it was definitely part of our calculus that we didn’t really have the ability to go and make a game in the style of traditional MMOs,” said Tyler Cloutier, co-founder of Clockwork Labs. “We are really focusing more on players creating content, and also procedurally generated content. So this is stuff that doesn’t require a huge team to create but does require some pretty advanced technology. And that’s our angle on player content and procedurally generated.”
Clockwork Labs said that its first game project, BitCraft, has received strong acclaim since its announcement in September 2021. The company says it wants to use the investment to recruit engineering and game programming experts while also increasing the size of its staff in other disciplines.
“The additional capital raised will enable us to scale the team considerably, and we are now even better equipped to face all challenges attached to creating a game world as ambitious as BitCraft’s,” said Alessandro Asoni, co-founder of Clockwork Labs. “Besides the obvious benefits of having additional funding, we are especially happy that so many accomplished industry innovators share our confidence in the BitCraft project.”
A16z’s Lai commented: “We were impressed by how the Clockwork Labs team is building both a compelling game in BitCraft as well as new proprietary technology in their underlying database architecture. That unique combo of innovation in both game design and infrastructure stood out to us and follows in the footsteps of companies like Epic Games who have been able to innovate along both dimensions.”
Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, Clockwork Labs previously raised $4.3 million in August 2021. The studio is fully-remote with staff positioned all over the world.
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