Gardens Interactive Raises $35M+ Series B Led by Lightspeed

Gardens Interactive announced on October 7, 2026, that it has secured more than $35 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, capital the Los Angeles studio said will fund the upcoming launch and live operations of its debut title, an unrevealed social roleplaying game the team calls a “strandbox.”

Lightspeed led the round and expanded the firm’s ownership in the studio. Zenith Capital, founded by James Altman, joined a group of new investors alongside Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, and Bayshore. Altman is an executive producer on the Fallout television series and a former publishing director at Bethesda Softworks. Individual investors in the round include Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and former chief executive of Slack; Andy Zhong, founder and chief executive of FunPlus; and Thomas Dimson, formerly of Instagram and co-creator of OpenAI’s Sora.

Returning investor Yamauchi No.10, the Nintendo family office, also took part. The studio said Gardens remains the family office’s first and only gaming startup investment across more than 100 years of the company’s gaming legacy.

The round also reshapes the studio’s board and advisory ranks. Moritz Baier-Lentz, who previously led the Series A investment in Gardens for Lightspeed, has joined the studio as an independent advisor. V Pappas, an operating partner at Lightspeed and former chief operating officer of TikTok, has joined the board of directors representing Lightspeed. Mike Hong of Krafton is joining the board representing Krafton, replacing Maria Park, who is moving to the leadership team in an independent advisory capacity. Altman will work closely with the founders to negotiate and manage the studio’s publishing relationships and to bring the game’s world to life across other mediums, the studio said.

Pappas said in the announcement that the desire for genuine human connection keeps growing as daily life speeds up and automation spreads, framing the bet on Gardens as a wager that experiences shared between real people are becoming more valuable as genuine human experience grows scarce.

Co-founder and chief executive Stephen Bell described social roleplay and player-driven worldbuilding as a majorly underserved category and said the studio’s ambition is to grow Gardens into a global leader in social entertainment.

“This funding gives us the room to ship a game of this scale properly, and to keep it alive and evolving for years to come,” Bell said.

A Social Roleplaying ‘Strandbox’

Co-founder and creative director Chris Bell, who previously helped design Journey and Sky: Children of the Light, said the game does not fit the labels people usually reach for, so the studio half-jokingly coined its own term and the name stuck.

“A strandbox is a sandbox where what you do stays behind for whoever passes through next, where the consequences of your actions can be felt by those you may never meet, and where players can deepen their bonds in a multitude of ways,” Bell said.

Bell said players explore an open, ever-changing world, the kind that pulls them toward the horizon the way The Legend of Zelda does, and one where they feel the effects of other players’ actions whether those players are standing beside them or passed through days earlier. Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding is a significant influence on that front, Bell said, as are the endless stories of GTA roleplay, the tension of crossing paths with strangers in Arc Raiders, and the emergent chaos of titles such as Peak and Big Walk.

The Petri Engine

The game runs on Petri, a proprietary world engine and matchmaker that blends procedural generation with hand-authored content. Co-founder and chief technology officer Lexie Dostal said the studio created Petri internally after concluding that no available technology could meet its needs: a virtually limitless world that a medium-sized team could realistically build and keep expanding in modular fashion for years.

Dostal said the team uses procedural generation where those systems serve the design and hand-authored content wherever the experience depends on it, producing a world that shapeshifts endlessly through divine influence, dynamic events, and communal efforts.

Altman, Zenith Capital’s chief investment officer, said he spent time with a pre-alpha build before investing and found the central idea already working in players’ hands, with a chance encounter between two strangers and a choice made by one of them leaving the world changed for whoever came next. Altman said the studio set out to create a new category rather than simply another game, and that he wants to help get the game into as many hands as possible.

Closed Pre-Alpha Tests

Alongside the funding news, Gardens opened applications for closed pre-alpha tests. In a blog post published earlier in 2026 and quoted in the announcement, the team said it is looking in particular for testers drawn from games that offer similar mechanical or social experiences, naming Sea of Thieves, Arc Raiders, The Legend of Zelda, and GTA Online, and for players who approach those games in different ways, whether their focus is PvP, PvE, or non-combat play. The studio said players of Peak and Big Walk are also wanted, and that applicants who fit the description and can keep the project confidential can sign up online.

Gardens Interactive describes itself as a distributed games studio whose developers worked on games including Journey, What Remains of Edith Finch, Sky: Children of the Light, Blaseball, Dustforce, and Guild Wars 2. The studio’s website also names Baldur’s Gate 3 among the team’s credits and lists 45 members. The site describes the flagship project as a shared fantasy adventure featuring tactile multiplayer play, in which players cross paths in an unpredictable wilderness of mystery and magic that reshapes itself.

The studio previously announced a $31.3 million Series A on July 11, 2023, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Krafton, with participation from Dreamhaven, TIRTA, Rendered VC, and a group of individual investors and executives. At that time, Gardens described the game as an online PvPvE fantasy adventure sandbox ARPG and said it had presented a playable prototype behind closed doors at GDC 2023. Park and Baier-Lentz both joined the board in connection with that round.

The studio said it is finalizing additional closings in the Series B on a rolling basis, with the full round expected to close by the end of October 2026.