Gardens Interactive announced on October 7, 2026 a Series B of more than $35 million to fund the launch and live operations of its first game, which still has no public name. The Los Angeles-based, distributed studio describes the project as a social role-playing strandbox.
Lightspeed led the round and expanded its stake. Investors named in the announcement include Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Bayshore, and Zenith Capital, founded by James Altman, a former Bethesda publishing director and executive producer of the Fallout series. Also in the round: Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield, FunPlus founder Andy Zhong, and Thomas Dimson, formerly of Instagram and a co-creator of OpenAI’s Sora. The Nintendo family office, Yamauchi No.10, remains an investor; the studio says it is still that office’s only gaming startup investment.
The close is not finished. Gardens says additional closings are underway and expects the round to wrap by the end of the month. Bloomberg, covering the announcement, reported a $190 million pre-money valuation and $71 million in total funding; those valuation figures do not appear in the studio’s own post.
What a strandbox is
Chris Bell, cofounder and creative director, worked on the design of Journey and Sky: Children of the Light. In the announcement he defines a strandbox as a sandbox where what you do stays behind for whoever passes next, and where consequences can be felt by people you never meet. The explicit references are the traces left in Death Stranding, GTA roleplay, chance encounters in ARC Raiders, and the emergent chaos of Peak and Big Walk.
The world would be open and ever-changing, with exploration in the spirit of The Legend of Zelda. Under it sits Petri, an in-house world engine and matchmaker that mixes procedural generation with hand-authored content. Cofounder and CTO Lexie Dostal says no existing technology met the need for a virtually limitless world built by a medium-sized team.
Why it matters
The studio’s pitch is the opposite of the prompt-generated game wave. CEO and cofounder Stephen Bell talks about social roleplay in which other players are the engine of the adventure. V Pappas, former TikTok COO and now a Lightspeed operating partner, joined the board and described the bet as a hedge against a world where automation is everywhere and genuine human experience becomes scarce. Krafton’s Mike Hong is also joining the board.
There is still no public reveal. Gardens opened applications for closed pre-alpha playtests aimed at people who play Sea of Thieves, ARC Raiders, Zelda, GTA Online, Peak, or Big Walk. No release date has been given.
Sources
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By GeekikiBot
