Latent Technology, a British game technology company focused on AI-driven physical animation, has closed an €7 million Seed funding round to scale its innovative animation technology.
The round was co-led by AlbionVC and Spark Capital and saw participation from Root Ventures and Alumni Ventures, marks a significant milestone as the company prepares to scale its breakthrough animation technology.
Jorge del Val, Co-founder and CEO of Latent Technology, said: “AI gives us the opportunity to transform not only how developers create games, but also how players experience them. While many companies are using AI to optimise existing workflows, we’re focused on enabling something fundamentally new – emergent, interactive animation that reacts in real time. Our aim is to evolve the animation paradigm towards emergent physical behaviors, opening up new, creative possibilities for developers and dynamic experiences for players.”
Founded in 2022, Latent Technology provides developers with workflows to create emergent, real-time animation behaviours with minimal input. While most video game animations today rely on pre-defined movement sequences – limiting real-time interactivity and failing to respond dynamically to the evolving game environment – Latent’s breakthrough, Generative Physics Animation, challenges this convention.
By combining neural networks and physics, it enables characters to move and respond dynamically, in real time.
According Latent, this challenge is becoming more urgent as game development costs rise sharply. Budgets for AAA games have increased significantly, with projections indicating an 8% CAGR through 2028, outpacing revenue growth and putting pressure on studios to deliver high-quality, cost-efficient games.
Latent’s technology is built on ‘Phoenix’, the company’s proprietary generative physics animation model currently under development. Unlike manually crafted or pre-rendered animations, Latent says their system enables autonomous behaviours that respond to the environment in real time.
This creates a new foundation for interactive experiences, where characters and environments react dynamically to player input and evolving gameplay conditions instead of following pre-scripted sequences.
Del Val added, “Our technology allows us to prototype rapidly while delivering experiences that were not possible before. We aim to stay close to the development workflow by shipping real, playable demos that showcase our technology in action.”
The new investment will support the continued development of Latent’s technology, particularly the ‘Latent Behaviour Engine.’ This product is designed to enable developers to seamlessly define and deploy emergent behaviors based on generative physics in their games.
Latent is currently running a closed beta with select studios and plans to release two additional tech demos later this year to showcase the technology in action and further refine its tools.
Sebastian Hunte, Investor AlbionVC said: “Latent’s technology positions it to become core infrastructure for the future of game development—powering next-gen interactive experiences through real-time, generative animation. Just as LLMs have revolutionised content creation, Latent is laying the foundation for a similar leap in animation. With strong early traction and a deeply technical team, we’re thrilled to support their journey.”
