I founded Studio Atelico in early 2025 together with Paul Szerlip, JP Chen, and Ennio De Nucci, all colleagues from my time at Geometric Intelligence and Uber AI. The idea had been brewing for a while: AI was transforming every industry, but games, the medium best positioned to harness truly intelligent, dynamic agents, were being handed cloud-based solutions that made no economic or creative sense.
I believe that cloud AI for video games is dead on arrival. The latency is incompatible with real-time gameplay, the per-query costs explode the moment you have any real player base, and handing your game's brain to an external API means losing control over one of your most critical systems. The only path that makes sense is running AI inference entirely on the player's hardware.
That conviction is what Studio Atelico is built on.
The On-Device AI Engine
Our core technology is a proprietary AI engine purpose-built for games. It runs model inference directly on consumer GPUs and Apple Neural Engines, with no cloud dependency, no latency, no usage costs, and no privacy concerns. The engine is modular and embeddable in Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot. It offers high-level agentic components for simulation games and lower-level primitives for developers who want to build their own gameplay mechanics on top of it.
The cost difference versus cloud is not marginal: it is about five orders of magnitude cheaper. That's what makes the game designs we're pursuing actually viable.
GARP — Generative AI Runtime for Play
Our first public tech demo is GARP. It runs 20+ simultaneous AI-driven characters in real time on a single Nvidia RTX 3090. Each agent plans its own day, forms memories, learns from interactions, coordinates with others, and responds dynamically to the game world and to players, all locally, at zero cloud cost.
For reference, the academic work this builds on (Stanford's Smallville simulation) cost around $500 per simulated game day when running on cloud APIs. GARP runs the same class of behavior in real time, on commodity hardware, for free.
Bobium Brawlers
Our debut game is Bobium Brawlers, a turn-based card and dice creature battler for iOS. Players describe a creature in their own words and the AI engine generates it on-device with a unique appearance, tailored abilities, and custom attacks. Think Pokémon, but where every creature in the game is one you invented.
Bobium Brawlers runs entirely on-device using our engine, starting from iPhone 13. One thing I care about deeply: we paid artists to develop the game's visual style, and we continue to pay them royalties on every creature generated using their training assets. Getting AI right in games means treating the humans who make art with respect.
The game is currently in development and will launch in 2026. Join our Discord to follow development and get early beta access.
Funding
In August 2025, Studio Atelico raised a $5M seed round led by Air Street Capital, with angel investment from:
- Chris Ré — Stanford Professor, co-founder of Predibase, founder of Factory
- Thomas Wolf — Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Hugging Face
- Alex Ratner — CEO and Co-founder, Snorkel AI
Press
PocketGamer: Meta and Creative Assembly vets form AI engine firm Studio Atelico
WCCFTech: Gamers Are Not Actually Opposed to AI — Exploitation and Slop Are the Problem
Creative Bloq: I experienced an AI-first game in action