Anorak raises $5M to make generative video playable

Anorak, a London studio founded by the team behind the mobile racing developer Hutch, has raised a $5 million pre-seed co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with Supercell and MTG participating, Mobilegamer.biz reported on November 11, 2026. Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron is among the angel investors, according to the same report. No valuation was disclosed.

The startup is led by CEO Shaun Rutland, who co-founded Hutch, and chief creative officer Jonathan Alpine, who held the same role at Hutch. David Amor is chief operating officer, and co-founder Tak Fung runs the company's applied AI lab in Chengdu, China, which Anorak's own blog describes as the team building much of its model tooling. Anorak lists about 20 staff across London and Chengdu, Mobilegamer.biz reported.

Anorak calls its subject interactive generative video, its term for video that responds to a player's choices and inputs in real time. In a post on the company's blog, Rutland describes Anorak as a technology entertainment company rather than a games company, and gives the format's best description so far as "generative video, made playable."

"At Hutch we saw how much a single passionate community can build around something made for them," Rutland said in the announcement. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should – taste is the whole game."

Anorak said the $5 million will go toward growing its London and Chengdu teams. Mobilegamer.biz reported that the company plans to release its first playable formats and launch a creator platform in early 2027.

No Anorak product is released. A company blog post dated August 26, 2026 describes a proprietary inference framework it calls anorak-inference, built to run multi-model generative workflows on a single GPU. Anorak said the framework swaps inactive models into pinned host memory so that a workflow chaining image-to-image, video generation and face-swapping can run on one H100 or squeeze onto a 32GB RTX 5090. The same post names Lightricks' LTX-2.5 video model among the models it uses and calls LTX-2.5 "still a relatively weak model compared to the newer Minimax-H3," which the team says it is working to make production ready. Anorak's first app, a dress-up video game called LookStar, is in closed testing, the company said. The single-card claim and the workflows are the company's own description of work in progress, not a tested product.

Rutland spent a decade at Hutch, the developer of Top Drives, F1 Manager and Rebel Racing. MTG's own release on the completed acquisition, dated December 18, 2020, states an up-front consideration of USD 275 million on a cash and debt free basis, plus earn-out payments at an expected value of USD 100 million in aggregate. Mobilegamer.biz puts the total for the deal at $375 million. uktech.news ran a headline of £282 million and states the total as $375 million, with $275 million of it up front. The three figures are consistent: the $375 million total is the $275 million up front plus the expected $100 million earn-out, and £282 million is that total converted at the time. MTG's own release does not state a single total.

"We're excited to learn how playable experiments will be used in social communities in the future," said Supercell investment director Jari Aalto in the announcement.

For creators, the pitch is a format layer rather than another generator. Anorak says it wants to put generative video in the hands of small communities that would never justify a traditionally made game, and to let those communities build play for themselves. Whether that arrives depends on a creator platform the company says it will ship in early 2027, built on an inference stack the company still describes as under development.

Anorak says its first playable formats and a creator platform are due in early 2027; LookStar remains in closed testing.