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Gardens Interactive, From Journey and Sky Veterans, Raises Over $35M for Its Debut Game
The studio founded by developers behind Journey, What Remains of Edith Finch and Sky: Children of the Light has closed a $35M+ Series B led by Lightspeed, taking total funding past $70M.
Big funding rounds have been rare in a games industry still working through layoffs and closures, which makes this one stand out. Gardens Interactive, a studio co-founded by veterans behind Journey, What Remains of Edith Finch and Sky: Children of the Light, has raised more than $35 million in a Series B round to build its first game.
What was announced
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and brings Gardens Interactive's total funding to more than $70 million. Other investors in the round include Zenith Capital, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, Innovation Endeavours and Bayshore. Individual backers include Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, FunPlus founder and CEO Andy Zhong, and Thomas Dimson, co-creator of OpenAI's Sora.
The money goes toward the studio's debut title, currently known by the working title Project Gardens. It is a multiplayer game the studio describes as a "shared fantasy adventure" with "social roleplay elements."
CEO Stephen Bell said social roleplay means "empowering players to be the engines of one another's adventures," and that the funding "gives us the room to ship a game of this scale properly, and to keep it alive and evolving for years to come."
Key details
- Studio: Gardens Interactive, co-founded by developers who worked on Journey, What Remains of Edith Finch and Sky: Children of the Light
- Round: Series B, more than $35M, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
- Total raised: more than $70M
- Game: Project Gardens (working title), a multiplayer fantasy adventure built around social roleplay
- Platforms, price and release date: not announced yet
- Board changes: former TikTok COO V Pappas joins the board for Lightspeed; Mike Hong represents Krafton on the board, succeeding Maria Park, who becomes an independent advisor. Lightspeed's Moritz Baier-Lentz also joins as an independent advisor.
Why it matters
Investors have been cautious about games since the post-2022 slowdown, and most new money has gone to proven teams with a clear pitch. Gardens checks both boxes: a pedigree in emotionally driven, social experiences (Journey and Sky are both known for wordless, cooperative play between strangers) and a bet on a category Bell calls "massive and majorly underserved." The investor list, which mixes classic venture firms, a games publisher in Krafton and people from tech and AI, shows where some of the confidence in games still lies: long-lived social worlds rather than one-off releases.
What it means for developers
- Social and cooperative design is attracting money. Games where players create stories for each other, rather than just compete, are getting serious investor attention.
- Pedigree still opens doors. A track record of shipped, well-known games remains the strongest asset in a funding pitch. Smaller teams can borrow the lesson by showing a playable prototype and a clear, specific category.
- Live games need runway. Bell's focus on keeping the game "alive and evolving for years" is a reminder that live and social games need funding well past launch, so budget for post-launch support from day one.
Sources
Cover image: © Gardens Interactive.
