Scriptic, the London-based immersive storytelling platform, has secured an investment from Sony Innovation Fund.
Scriptic, which recently rebranded from ElectricNoir, was founded by CEO Nihal Tharoor and chief creative officer Benedict Tatham, who identified an opportunity in the entertainment space.
The studio is behind the BAFTA-nominated Netflix gaming hit Scriptic: Crime Stories, which has had more than 1.5 million installs of its proprietary app.
The latest investment brings the second close of Scriptic’s seed round to $6.2m, following a June investment of £4.5m led by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from Tower 26, the Amazon Alexa Fund, and additional and returning investors.
It brings the company’s total seed round to a close at $8.7m.
The investment will be used to help Scriptic grow its content pipeline of interactive, phone-first shows, and activates its UGC strategy by putting its AI-powered creator tools into the hands of external writers and storytellers.
Antonio Avitabile, managing director-EU of Sony Ventures Corporation, which manages Sony Innovation Fund, said: “Scriptic is emerging as a front-runner in the future of interactive entertainment, and we are excited to be partnering with the team for the next chapter of their growth journey in an area where we see tremendous opportunity.
“Scriptic’s highly scalable, efficient and sophisticated mobile-first approach pushes the boundaries of interactive content, and we believe the company’s UGC offering has the potential to take this further by empowering the creativity of millions of everyday storytellers.”
Nihal Tharoor, CEO and co-founder of Scriptic, said: “It’s a huge honour to have Sony Innovation Fund join our roster of stellar investors, and we’re thrilled that they share our vision for the future of interactive media and storytelling.”
The company’s phone-first approach makes content efficient to produce, easily scalable, and highly accessible for consumers.
Scriptic is also one of the first entertainment companies to leverage generative AI tools in a production capacity.
They have employed tools like ElevenLabs, ChatGPT, Midjourney and Runway Gen-2 in partnership with human writers, actors and creatives to develop titles like uncanny horror anthology Dark Mode, zombie series Viral, and comedy courtroom drama You Be The Judge!
As well as continuing to build its own pipeline of interactive phone-first shows, Scriptic’s long-term vision is to give anyone the ability to quickly and easily build high quality, seamless interactive phone-first dramas.
As a first step, the company is building a UGC offering which puts its AI-enabled creator tools in the hands of dozens of curated external builders.
A cloud-based creator suite will give writers one node-based service which wires together generative language models, diffusion models, and audio synthesis models.