Wicked Saints Studios raises $3.5m for blended-reality game

Wicked Saints Studios raised $3.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round co-led by Riot Games and Oregon Venture Fund.

The round also included investments from Bronze, 1Up, Precursor, Authentic, Origins, Mini Fund, Cap Table Coalition, Gaingels, and Rogue Women.

With pre-seed funding, the studio has raised an overall total of $4.6 million, which will go towards bringing its blended-reality mobile game World Reborn to market in 2025. The money raised will also fund the construction of a tech stack to support high-volume scaling.

Wicked Saints Studios was co-founded by Emmy-award-winning storyteller Jess Murrey and COO Alicia Clifton, former interim director of philanthropy and global communications at peacebuilding organisation Search for Common Ground.

The team is composed of game industry and entertainment veterans, including:

• Amanda Julina Gonzalez (artist, former cleanup artist and colourist at Cartuna)
• Andrés Minaya (Unity engineer, former project lead developer at Tropyverse)
• Christian Marsh Reiman (narrative director, localisation editor and writer at Kabam)
• Daphne Larose (CTO, former technical lead manager at Niantic)
• Kiersten Van Dorp (junior project manager, former direct support professional at non-profit Tandem Northwest)
• Lucas D'Avila (senior software engineer, co-founder of app TimeAlign)
• Mitchell Smallman (CPO, former creative director at Netspeak Games)
• Neil Martinez (QA lead, former senior QA tester at 2K Vegas)

"Wicked Saints empowers players to believe in and hone their own abilities through immersive storytelling, gameplay, and community," said CEO and co-founder Jess Murrey.

"In a world where so much technology is driving us apart or away from authentic human connection, we're mission-driven to get value-driven Gen Z players reconnected with themselves, each other, and out changing the issues they care about."

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox