Stealth startup Manticore Games raises $30M to launch a game-making platform for novices

Investors are betting on gaming platforms as an area of consumer tech with plenty of room left to grow.

Today, Manticore Games, a stealth gaming startup announced that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital, Correlation Ventures, BITKRAFT Esports Ventures, M Ventures, Arrive, Sapphire Sport, Tuesday Capital, and SV Angel. The gaming startup has now disclosed that they’re raised at least $45 million in financing, all before they’ve shipped a product.

They are announcing the name and some limited details of what it is that they’re building.

Their upcoming product is called CORE and it’s a way for gamers to build new, custom experiences. Users can build and monetize experiences that they create on the platform and it appears that they won’t need much of a technical background to be order to do so.

“The traditional game development pipeline is very rigid and very complex,” CEO Frederic Descamps told TechCrunch in an interview. “We’re really focused on bringing a new generation of game-makers to game-making.”

The startup is still in stealth so there’s a good deal about CORE that they say they’re not ready to talk about quite yet. It’s built on the Unreal Engine and doesn’t appear to be a game engine in itself and Manticore’s founders are comparing it more to a Twitch or YouTube in terms of how users will engage with creators’ game content, there’s all a good deal up in the air. They haven’t given a timeline for launch, but it sounds like something will be available soon.

In press materials, the company calls itself a “collaborative social ecosystem that supports a wide variety of shared online experiences.”

Manticore appears to be injecting itself into an arena that’s mostly represented by massively popular online games with “creator modes” like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft. Moving to the platform side before establishing a strong base via a popular title is obviously risky. The company declined to comment on whether they would be launching the platform alongside some of its own first-party experiences.

Descamps and his co-founder Jordan Maynard previously ran a game studio called “A Bit Lucky” that was acquired by Zynga in 2012. The co-founders both stayed on as executives at Zynga until launching Manticore.