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Gardens Interactive, the Los Angeles studio founded by veterans of Journey and Sky: Children of the Light, has closed more than $35 million in Series B funding, the company confirmed in an October 7 announcement. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and pulls in a investor list that mixes traditional venture capital with gaming royalty and tech-world angels, according to Gardens Interactive’s own announcement, WN Hub, and outlets including Bloomberg and Video Games Chronicle.
Gardens Interactive Secures $35 Million Series BInside the Funding Round: The Numbers That MatterWho Are Stephen Bell, Chris Bell, and Lexie DostalFrom Journey to Sky: The Thatgamecompany PedigreeWhat Is Project Gardens? Inside the Social Roleplay ConceptThe Investor Roster Reads Like a Tech Industry Who’s WhoWhy This Round Is a Signal for Social Gaming InvestmentThe “Friendslop” Problem Gardens Wants to SolveCompetitive Landscape: Gardens vs. the Social Gaming FieldHistorical Context: What Journey and Sky Proved About Multiplayer DesignWhat Industry Voices Are SayingPredictions: Where Gardens Interactive Goes From HereThe Risks Ahead for Gardens InteractiveFrequently Asked QuestionsRelated Coverage
The new capital pushes Gardens’ total funding past $70 million since its 2021 founding, and multiple reports peg the studio’s valuation at roughly $190 million following the raise. For a developer that has yet to reveal its debut title in full, that is a striking sum, and it says as much about where investors think multiplayer social gaming is headed as it does about the pedigree of the three founders behind it.
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Gardens Interactive Secures $35 Million Series B
The headline number is straightforward: more than $35 million, disclosed by Gardens Interactive itself and echoed across every outlet tracking the deal. Lightspeed Venture Partners took the lead position, with Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, and Innovation Endeavors named as participating firms, according to WN Hub’s coverage of the round. The studio’s own blog post frames the raise as fuel for finishing, launching, and running the live operations of its still-unnamed debut game.
What makes this Series B stand out from a typical gaming funding story is the guest list. Alongside the institutional venture names, Gardens pulled in the Nintendo family and the ZeniMax family as backers, plus a cluster of individual tech and gaming figures. That combination of old-guard console royalty, the studio behind Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and venture capital heavyweights is unusual even by the standards of a hot funding cycle in games.
Inside the Funding Round: The Numbers That Matter
Gardens Interactive’s capital history did not start with this round. The studio first raised $4.5 million shortly after launching in 2021, then closed a $31.3 million Series A in 2023, per WN Hub’s reporting. Added together, that put the pre-Series B total at roughly $35.8 million, meaning this single Series B round is, by itself, nearly as large as everything the studio raised in its first four years combined.
Funding RoundYearAmount RaisedLead or Notable BackersCumulative Total
Seed2021$4.5 millionUndisclosed early backers$4.5 million
Series A2023$31.3 millionUndisclosed Series A investors$35.8 million
Series B2026$35 million+Lightspeed Venture Partners (lead)$70 million+
That $70 million-plus cumulative figure, combined with a reported $190 million valuation, puts Gardens in rare company for a studio that has not yet shipped a single commercial title. For comparison, plenty of funded game studios ship their first product before ever approaching a nine-figure valuation. Gardens is doing it in reverse, betting that its founders’ design pedigree and an unrevealed concept are enough to justify the number before a single player has logged in.
Who Are Stephen Bell, Chris Bell, and Lexie Dostal
Gardens Interactive was co-founded by Stephen Bell, Chris Bell, and Lexie Dostal, according to The SaaS News and corroborating coverage. Stephen Bell serves as co-founder and CEO, and his design credits include work as a writer on both Journey and What Remains of Edith Finch. Chris Bell brings credits spanning Journey, Sky: Children of the Light, and Dustforce, plus his own earlier student project, a game called Way.
That resume matters because Journey and Sky were not just critical darlings. They were foundational texts for an entire genre of low-friction, emotionally driven multiplayer design, one built around wordless cooperation between strangers rather than competition or chat-based socializing. Investors backing Gardens are, in effect, betting that the people who wrote that design language the first time can do it again at a larger scale.
From Journey to Sky: The Thatgamecompany Pedigree
Journey, released in 2012, and Sky: Children of the Light, released in 2019, both came out of Thatgamecompany and both built their entire design around anonymous, cooperative encounters between players. Neither leaned on voice chat, text chat, or even usernames in the conventional sense. Both became reference points that other studios have spent more than a decade trying to copy, with mixed results. Gardens Interactive, formed in 2021 according to SignalBase’s funding database, was built explicitly to take another run at that design space with a bigger budget and a different structure: a globally distributed team rather than a single studio office.
That history also explains why this raise is being treated as gaming news rather than a routine venture capital line item. The gaming industry has spent 2026 watching big publishers chase live-service scale, while a small studio with a two-person design lineage from a decade-old art-house hit is raising venture rounds that rival what mid-size publishers spend on entire marketing campaigns.
What Is Project Gardens? Inside the Social Roleplay Concept
Gardens Interactive has not given its debut game an official title in public reporting; it is referred to in coverage simply as the studio’s debut project. The company itself describes the game as a social roleplaying experience, with some reporting characterizing it as a “friendship sandbox” and others using the term “strandbox” to describe a game built around players crossing paths in an unpredictable, shapeshifting wilderness.
When Gardens raised its Series A in 2023, Chris Bell described the concept directly, saying the game was “inspired by our favorite memories playing online RPGs, MMOs, and fantasy action-adventure games over the years, memories of crossing paths with strangers,” a quote drawn from Gardens’ Series A announcement. Bell went further in the same post, explaining that the game “builds upon multiplayer ideas and lessons from previous titles I helped design like Journey, Sky, and even my student game Way, while bringing players into a higher stakes, shapeshifting fantasy wilderness where cooperation is key, yet betrayal is still possible.”
That betrayal angle is notable. Journey and Sky were almost entirely cooperative by design, with no mechanism for one player to meaningfully harm another. A game that keeps the wordless, anonymous-stranger structure but introduces real stakes and the possibility of betrayal is a different proposition, closer to something like a social deduction game crossed with an open-world RPG than a direct Sky sequel.
The Investor Roster Reads Like a Tech Industry Who’s Who
Beyond the institutional venture firms, the individual names attached to this round are doing a lot of the talking. Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder and former CEO of Slack, is named as a backer. So is Andy Zhong of FunPlus, the mobile games publisher behind titles like State of Survival. Thomas Dimson, identified in reporting as a co-author of OpenAI’s Sora video model, is also listed among the participants, according to Runtime Wire’s reporting on the round.
BackerCategoryNotable Connection
Lightspeed Venture PartnersVenture capital (lead)Round lead investor
Sequoia CapitalVenture capitalNamed participant in the round
Index VenturesVenture capitalNamed participant in the round
AccelVenture capitalNamed participant in the round
Innovation EndeavorsVenture capitalNamed participant in the round
Nintendo familyFamily office / angelDescribed as a named backer in multiple reports
ZeniMax familyFamily office / angelDescribed as a named backer in multiple reports
Stewart ButterfieldIndividual angelCo-founder and former CEO of Slack
Andy ZhongIndividual angelAssociated with FunPlus
Thomas DimsonIndividual angelIdentified in reports as a co-author of OpenAI’s Sora
It is worth separating what is confirmed from what is still fuzzy here. The involvement of named venture firms is consistently reported across multiple outlets. The framing of “the Nintendo family” and “the ZeniMax family” as backers appears in the reporting without further detail on which specific individuals within those families are writing checks, so readers should treat that detail as reported rather than independently itemized.
Why This Round Is a Signal for Social Gaming Investment
Venture capital interest in standalone game studios cooled considerably after the 2022-2023 contraction in gaming investment, when layoffs across the industry made growth-stage checks for unproven, unreleased titles much harder to justify. A $35 million-plus Series B for a studio that still has not shipped a game, arriving in the same year that major publishers have announced waves of job cuts, cuts through that trend sharply.
That contrast has not gone unnoticed inside the industry. Xbox alone has cut roughly 5,750 jobs across its studios this year, and smaller teams have faced closures even as this single pre-launch studio pulls in more capital than most mid-tier publishers spend developing an entire game. It illustrates a split market: capital is retreating from large, established live-service operations while still chasing design pedigree in smaller, founder-led studios that can plausibly claim to be building the next Journey or Minecraft.
That dynamic is not unique to gaming. The pattern of venture money concentrating around founder pedigree and category-defining potential, rather than spreading evenly across an industry, mirrors what has happened in adjacent fields this year. Nous Research closed a $90 million Series B for AI agent development on a similar thesis: back a small, credentialed team early, before the product is public, because the category itself is still being defined.
The “Friendslop” Problem Gardens Wants to Solve
Bloomberg’s framing of the round described Gardens as aiming to “upend” the viral genre of casual, whimsical social games sometimes dismissed inside the industry as “friendslop,” referencing titles designed for quick, low-stakes socializing rather than deep systems or lasting consequence. That framing positions Gardens’ debut project as a reaction against the current wave of casual multiplayer hits that prioritize virality and short session lengths over the kind of slower, more deliberate stranger-to-stranger bonding that defined Journey and Sky.
That is a meaningful bet given how the broader free-to-play and social gaming market has been shifting. Roblox’s share of overall gaming playtime has been tracked climbing toward 8 percent this year even as some long-running free-to-play franchises lose ground, a sign that audiences are still migrating toward open-ended, social, user-driven platforms rather than away from them. If Gardens can land a product in that same category with more narrative weight and real consequence, there is a clear audience already primed for it.
Competitive Landscape: Gardens vs. the Social Gaming Field
Gardens Interactive is not entering an empty field. Thatgamecompany itself continues to operate and update Sky: Children of the Light years after the founders of Gardens left. Beyond that direct lineage, the broader “cozy multiplayer” and social sandbox category includes everything from Roblox’s user-generated ecosystem to smaller indie efforts chasing the same wordless-cooperation formula that made Journey a cultural touchstone.
What differentiates Gardens on paper is capital and ambition. A $190 million valuation gives the studio runway that most indie teams working in this space simply do not have, and the betrayal mechanic Chris Bell described suggests Gardens is trying to combine the emotional intimacy of Journey with systems depth closer to a survival or social-deduction game. That is a harder design problem than either genre alone, and it is the single biggest execution risk sitting underneath this funding story. Investors are backing a pitch, not a playable build that has been shown publicly in full.
The timing also puts Gardens into a crowded release calendar. Steam alone is on pace for roughly $20 billion in platform revenue in 2026, up about 13 percent year over year, which signals a healthy overall market for new releases but also means attention is more contested than ever. A social game without a confirmed release window is competing for future mindshare against titles that are already shipping.
Historical Context: What Journey and Sky Proved About Multiplayer Design
Journey‘s central trick, matching two strangers who could not speak to each other and letting them discover cooperation organically, was considered a significant risk when Thatgamecompany pitched it originally. It paid off critically and commercially, and it is frequently cited in design courses as a landmark example of mechanics-driven emotional storytelling. Sky: Children of the Light took the same core idea and scaled it into an ongoing live game with seasonal content, proving the formula could sustain a business model beyond a single linear playthrough.
That track record is the entire thesis behind this Series B. Lightspeed and the other lead investors are not underwriting a new idea; they are underwriting the belief that the team which proved this design language works twice before can do it a third time, at a larger scale and with real stakes attached. Whether betrayal mechanics and higher-stakes systems can coexist with the emotional softness that made the earlier games resonate is the open question the debut title will have to answer.
What Industry Voices Are Saying
Gardens Interactive framed the round in explicitly mission-driven terms. In its Series B announcement, the studio stated: “We embarked on this adventure to grow the future of social roleplay, to celebrate the unpredictable miracle that is another person. Social roleplay means empowering players to be the engines of one another’s adventures, to give them the tools to express themselves, connect and communicate – to invite them to forge lasting relationships, landmark memories, and to transform the world together. We’re proud to also unite this incredible group of investors. Just like the game itself, everything is better together,” according to the studio’s official announcement.
Co-founder Chris Bell has been the most vocal about design specifics across both the Series A and Series B cycles. As noted above, Bell has described the project as drawing from “our favorite memories playing online RPGs, MMOs, and fantasy action-adventure games over the years, memories of crossing paths with strangers,” and has tied the game directly to his prior work, noting it “builds upon multiplayer ideas and lessons from previous titles I helped design like Journey, Sky, and even my student game Way,” per Gardens’ Series A announcement. Neither Stephen Bell nor Lexie Dostal has a verified public quote attached to the Series B round specifically beyond the studio’s joint statement.
Predictions: Where Gardens Interactive Goes From Here
Expect a formal name reveal and first extended gameplay footage for the debut title within the next development cycle, since studios typically use a round this size to fund a push toward a public showcase rather than sit quietly on the money.
Watch for Gardens to expand headcount significantly from its current globally distributed team structure, given that $35 million-plus is explicitly earmarked for development, launch, and live operations rather than a single milestone.
The betrayal-and-cooperation hybrid design is likely to draw comparisons to social deduction hits once more details emerge, and Gardens will probably lean into that framing rather than avoid it, given how much current attention social deduction mechanics draw.
Other venture firms are likely to take a second look at founder-led, design-pedigree game studios following this round, particularly teams with a direct lineage to a previously successful, genre-defining title.
Given the valuation attached to a pre-launch studio, expect scrutiny to intensify if Gardens misses its own informal timeline; a $190 million mark on an unreleased game raises the bar for what counts as a successful launch rather than lowering it.
The Risks Ahead for Gardens Interactive
The clearest risk is execution against a concept that is, by its own founders’ description, more systemically ambitious than either of the games that made their names. Blending the anonymous, wordless cooperation of Journey and Sky with meaningful betrayal mechanics and higher stakes is a harder design target than either extreme alone, and there is no public playable build to point to yet that proves the combination works.
There is also market timing risk. A crowded 2026 release calendar, with major franchises and platform revenue both climbing, means Gardens will eventually need to cut through noise with a product, not just a funding headline. And there is reputational risk tied to the scale of the investor list itself: when a round includes this many high-profile individual names, expectations for the eventual reveal rise accordingly, and a muted or delayed launch would draw outsized attention relative to a quieter, less star-studded raise.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much did Gardens Interactive raise in its Series B round?
More than $35 million, according to the studio’s own announcement and corroborating coverage from WN Hub and other outlets.
Who led the Series B funding round?
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, and Innovation Endeavors named as participating investors.
Who founded Gardens Interactive?
Stephen Bell, Chris Bell, and Lexie Dostal co-founded the studio in 2021. Stephen Bell serves as CEO, with credits including writing work on Journey and What Remains of Edith Finch. Chris Bell’s prior credits include Journey, Sky: Children of the Light, and Dustforce.
What game is Gardens Interactive working on?
The studio’s debut project has not been given a public title. It has been described in reporting as a social roleplaying game, with the studio characterizing it as a fantasy wilderness experience built around cooperation and the possibility of betrayal among players.
How much has Gardens Interactive raised in total?
More than $70 million across a 2021 seed round, a 2023 Series A, and the 2026 Series B, according to funding data reported by WN Hub.
What is Gardens Interactive’s valuation?
Multiple reports, citing Bloomberg, put the studio’s valuation at roughly $190 million following the Series B round.
Where is Gardens Interactive based?
Current reporting describes the studio as based in Los Angeles, California, though Gardens has also described itself as a globally distributed team since its 2021 founding.
Why are Nintendo and ZeniMax family members investing in a gaming startup?
Reporting on the round lists the Nintendo family and the ZeniMax family among the backers without further detail on individual participants, suggesting personal interest from individuals connected to those legacy gaming companies rather than corporate investment from Nintendo or ZeniMax themselves.
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Marcus Chen
Gaming & Consumer Tech Editor
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