Aaron Vontell, a 25-year MIT graduate, started Regression Games back in May 2022 and announced today that the young gaming entity has raised $4.2 million in seed funding. The funding was provided by NEA, a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), BBQ Capital, and Roosh Ventures alongside a few angel investors.
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The young entrepreneur said the gaming firm is focused on bringing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to competitive gaming and esports. Regression Games is working on an AI-powered competitive gaming platform and an ecosystem that comes with it.
In the official press release, the Founder and CEO Vontell said:
“Players will write code and AIs that control characters, debug strategies in real-time, compete for prizes in tournaments and top spots on the leaderboards, and collaborate with friends to build the best bots possible.
“Rather than playing with a controller or mouse and keyboard, players program algorithms and machine learning models to battle others. The AI platform will be made to integrate with both existing games and games that Regression Games will develop.”
Vontell added that he’s an avid consumer of esports and closely follows what’s happening in League of Legends LCS and LEC (championships), also keeps an eye on Apex Legends’ ALGS. The young businessperson said he’s quite “excited for AI to become a cornerstone” of the esports space. Vontell said, “I imagine a future of both beginner coders and professional machine learning research centers participating in world championships to claim the title of Best AI Gamer.”
However, the young CEO doesn’t limit his vision to just player-based products, he further comments on how the AI tools and the platform Regression Games is building can make a major difference and be useful for developers across many gaming spaces. Vontell says “Bots in games are pretty bad.” —an argument that’s hard to object— and believes they can do a lot more than what is currently available.
Vontell says Regression Games will use this seed funding to build its community and they’ll start hosting alpha tests on the platform soon. The platform will have leaderboards and they’ll organize a few tournaments where players can compete to show off their skills.
The young entrepreneur worked as an early engineer at the AI-powered automation company Instabase. He also took part in Battlecode during his MIT years, an annual competition in which an MIT club creates a video game and students from all around the world compete in AI-driven battles against fellow students.
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