Echo Chunk raises $1.4M to make AI-based puzzle games

Echo Chunk, the AI startup behind the viral free-to-play, daily puzzle game Echo Chess, has raised $1.4 million in a funding round.

Echo Chess is a daily chess-inspired puzzle game where you are what you eat. You play as one color and your goal is to capture all the other pieces on the board, navigating your way around obstacles.

But here’s the catch — and the hard part, said Sami Ramly, CEO of Echo Chunk, in an interview with GamesBeat. Every time you capture a piece, you become that piece. This means that every move you make needs to be carefully considered so you don’t get stuck in your quest to clear the board.

New daily puzzles drop every 24 hours, the Classic for Wordle-type fans, and the Epic for pro puzzle enthusiasts. The game notably offers a Blitz Mode that uses AI procedural generation, allowing you to compete on infinite runs in a roguelite take on chess.

A game built by AI

The Echo Chess game is inspired by chess, but it’s not quite chess.

“Your goal is to capture all the other pieces of the board. But every time you capture a piece, you become the echo of that piece,” he said.

In creating games, Ramly said, “We’re starting with the same process we’ve used with AI to improve the creation process. We think of it as a collaboration between humans and AI. We’ll figure out what’s the best of both worlds.”

The game launched in April and went viral. At the moment, the company isn’t focused on monetization.

Raising money

After Echo Chess gained popularity among players, puzzle gamers, and mainstream audiences alike, top investors in the technology and games industry were excited to participate in Echo Chunk’s recent pre-seed round.

The investors include A16z Speedrun by Andreessen Horowitz; Mark Pincus, founder and chairman of Zynga; South Park Commons (SPC); Eric Wu, CEO of Opendoor; Stef Corazza, head of generative AI at Roblox; AJ Apte, CEO of Snapser; Patrick Wyatt, founder of ArenaNet (Guild Wars); Joon Park, AI researcher and lead author of Stanford Generative Agents; Albert Lai, founder of Kontagent; Founders You Should Know (FYSK); and David King, early Google employee and angel investor in Quora.

“We’re honored to be supported by top minds in tech and games to bring the Echo Chunk vision to life, and to leverage the power of AI in game design,” said Ramly. “These amazing partners immediately understood our passion for AI’s role in the co-creation process of the future.”

The company set out to raise $1 million, but it ended up being an oversubscribed round.

“We feel honored and grateful to be supported by these investors who have a passion for AI as well as the co-creation process,” Ramly said.

Josh Lu, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in a statement, “We firmly believe that Al will enhance the ingenuity of game designers, and the Echo Chess team has demonstrated this brilliantly with their debut title by using AI to put a fresh spin on their daily game. They’ve done so really quickly with a very small team, and have already built a passionate community of players and speedrunners with fresh content every day. That’s something that would have been extremely difficult a few years ago.”

“When you see a big shift in tech, game companies that get it early have the best odds of winning” said Pincus, who started Zynga, in a statement. “We saw it at Zynga with social and mobile, and now it’s happening with AI. The Echo Chess team gets it. Their vision for where game design is heading is innovative, and their first game is super fun.”

Origins

Ramly has a strong background in tech and machine learning and having led teams at tech and entertainment startups. Trained at Stanford, he is also a lifelong strategy gamer. He played games at an early age and he said he began noticing a stagnation in the ingenuity of novel games, with remasters and repetitive sequels crowding the market supply. So he set out to make his own by reinventing the mechanics of chess, a game he first learned when he was three years old and played on a wooden board.

“I’ve been obsessed with strategy ever since,” Ramly said. “It got pretty obvious to me that the fresh supply of strategy games is struggling. But the underlying demand among people is still super high. I became really convinced to find a great opportunity today, all the advancements in AI are going to give us a bunch of fresh ideas.”

There are things that people haven’t imagined that AI can do and bring to us, Ramly believes. He is fascinated by how short the learning cycle is when AI creates a game design and then moves on to the next version.

“Our vision with a Echo Chunk is that we’ll be making epic strategy games that generate themselves,” he said.

At startups in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Ramly became fascinated with the ingenious ways AI could be used to shorten the learning cycle for game development and take the game design process to the next level.

“I became convinced there was a real opportunity today for a huge wave of fresh ideas and game design innovations to revolutionize strategy games,” said Ramly. “It was pretty clear to me that companies that can natively leverage AI in game design will be able to shorten the learning cycle of game creation, lower the barrier for user-generated content (UGC), and empower what we do best as humans to create the best games of tomorrow. So we set out to build them ourselves, starting with Echo Chess.”

Corazza at Roblox strongly agrees, “AI has the potential to be the best copilot for game design. Echo Chess is a great example for this with its infinite Blitz Mode, and I can see this same approach enhancing an endless variety of user-generated maps dreamed up by its players of all age groups.”

Since its launch, Echo Chess has organically gained a passionate, growing community of devoted players. It quickly caught the attention of Eric Wu, founder of Opendoor and avid strategy game player.

“As a fan of chess, I think what’s special about Echo Chess is that it is a natural bridge for beginners to hone their skills, while still being really fun and compelling for the pros,” Wu said.

The game topped the front page of Hacker News twice and has trended on the YouTube Games charts, with large creators and streamers posting gameplay and challenge videos.

User-generated content

Over time, the company will demo a mapmaker tech, dubbed Echo Maker. It will give people the same tools the company uses to create Echo Chess puzzles. You could do things like move the pieces around and resize the board. Then you could submit them for editorial review.

Over time, the company will likely create the kernel of the games it will support, like a chess game. Then it will empower players to come up with different versions of it. Ramly wants to evolve the process so that users can also create their own games. With AI help, user-generated content is something that the company hopes to move to in the future.

Replacing humans? Nah.

I asked if the company will still need game designers.

“Absolutely. It’s an excellent question. If anything, the craft evolves. I think it gets much more interesting and exciting to see where the multiple iterations of tech platforms go. There is a lot of uneasiness about it. I think what we’re demonstrating is that AI can actually empower creators.”

As much as he likes the idea of AI helping humans, Ramly doesn’t want AI to take over.

“The reason why humans are so essential, and the creation process is as I have described, is I think more things will be created with the help of AI. Our team is hiring research workers from all sorts of backgrounds,” Ramly said. “We obviously know it’s extremely difficult in the industry, with its history of downsizing. We’ve been looking for opportunities for new companies to come out of this. We want to use tools to create things that weren’t possible before. If anything, there will be a great wave of AI helping job creation.”

When it comes to design with humans and AI, Ramly said the team uses a mix of supervised learning and deep learning approaches to model games. With Echo Chess, there is an infinite procedurally generated real-time mode. It is fully AI created, where each board is different. It’s a combo of AI and humans creating puzzles.

And based on feedback from the player community, the AI is helping the humans do good work faster.

“We generate content with the help of AI, and we still have a human touch to it,” he said.

The team has four people, and now it has funds to hire more. But, of course, with AI doing the work of creation, it will be interesting to see how many people the company needs.

“I think of the beauty of unlocking a lot of the creation and deletion process with the help of a copilot like AI,” he said. “We imagine AI being super helpful in the UGC process itself as well. Zooming out, applying it to game design can help us in multiple ways. We feel like this will be the future of the industry, where people think of AI as a copilot on the side of human design.”