Hutch founders raise £4m to make AI-generated video playable

Supercell and MTG, the company that bought the founders’ last studio, join Play Ventures and Backed VC in backing Anorak, which plans to open a creator platform in early 2027.

The team that built Hutch, the London mobile studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, has raised £4m (about $5m) for a new venture that sets out to turn AI-generated video into something people can play. Anorak’s pre-seed round was co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with Supercell and MTG also investing alongside angel backers including Justin Waldron, a co-founder of Zynga.

Several of the investors already know the founders well. Backed VC was among Hutch’s investors, and MTG is the Swedish group that bought the studio in December 2020. MTG paid $275m upfront and agreed to as much as $100m more in earn-out payments linked to Hutch’s financial performance from 2021 to 2024. Supercell, the Helsinki developer of Clash of Clans, is now backing a company that has yet to release a commercial product.

Anorak calls its format “interactive generative video”: footage produced by AI models that changes in real time in response to a user’s choices and inputs. Shaun Rutland, the chief executive and a Hutch co-founder, has been explicit that this is a departure from his previous business. In a blog post he called Anorak a technology entertainment company and said it was building play patterns and a platform intended to make any pursuit playable. He put it more bluntly elsewhere: “We’re not making mobile games this time.”

The company began as a generative video research project and now employs 20 people split between London and Chengdu. Its engineers are developing proprietary inference technology, the software that runs AI models once they are trained, with the aim of making generated video faster, cheaper and easier to control. Tak Fung, a co-founder and Anorak’s chief of AI, leads the Chengdu lab. Jonathan Alpine, the chief creative officer, was a founding employee at Hutch and held the same title there. Fellow industry veteran David Amor has joined as chief operating officer, according to the trade site Mobilegamer.biz.

What Anorak has shown so far comes in the form of weekly experiments posted to its blog. These have included a dress-up game made from generative video, a boxing game, and a demo in which an alien salesman inspects images supplied by the user and tries to sell them back. The company has admitted it is still settling on a name for the format, and has said details of how it will reach players will follow later.

The commercial thesis rests on small, devoted audiences. Anorak says it will build playable formats for specific interests, citing anglers and padel players as examples, and then hand its tools to those communities so they can make content for themselves. Rutland argues that each time production became cheaper in music, film and games, value shifted to those with the judgement to sort through the resulting glut. “At Hutch we saw how much a single passionate community can build around something made for them,” he said.

Investors framed the bet in similar terms. Alex Brunicki, a founding partner at Backed VC, said most AI entertainment companies were “using new tools to make old formats faster”, and pointed to technical progress the team had made over the past 12 months. Harri Manninen of Play Ventures cited the founders’ combination of entertainment experience and AI expertise. Jari Aalto, investment director at Supercell, said the Finnish company was keen to see how such experiments would be used in social communities.

Real-time video generation remains computationally expensive, and keeping AI output consistent enough to support coherent play is an unsolved problem across the field. An analysis by Runtime Wire noted that while the Hutch pedigree gives the founders credibility, the cost, controllability and repeat appeal of the format have yet to be proven. Anorak has not disclosed its valuation or how it intends to make money.

Anorak is entering a crowded area. Start-ups elsewhere are pursuing continuously generated, interactive video, among them Visko, a Sunnyvale company that raised a $10m pre-seed round and launched a live interactive video model on 1 September.

The new money will go towards hiring in London and Chengdu, releasing the first playable formats and launching the creator platform, which the company is aiming to open in early 2027.