Early Game Ventures announces a $600,000 pre-seed investment in Tryll, a startup that promises to revolutionize the video game industry by solving one of the biggest challenges faced by gaming studios—integrating AI into games—without relying on costly resources such as third-party cloud services or servers.
With Tryll, gaming studios can create titles in which artificial intelligence runs locally, using the powerful graphics processors of gaming computers, thereby reducing both costs and operational risks.
What makes Tryll different?
Currently, game studios have two options, both problematic: either they use cloud-based AI services, which are not cost-effective at scale—as is the case with games—and also come with drawbacks (privacy risks, dependence on the decisions of the provider, etc.), or they attempt to build everything in-house, which requires large teams of specialized engineers that few studios can afford.
Tryll now offers a third solution: a software system that runs AI models directly on the player’s computer, leveraging its graphical processing power. In essence, it turns a complex technology into a tool that any game studio can integrate relatively easily, without advanced AI expertise. As an analogy, Tryll is to AI in gaming what DirectX was to 3D graphics.
Why now?
The timing of Tryll’s market entry could not be better. Modern graphics cards—including mid-range ones—are now powerful enough to run such AI models locally, and the quality of available open-source LLM models has improved significantly in recent years.
Moreover, the AI market in the gaming industry is estimated to grow from $3.3 billion in 2024 to over $51 billion by 2033.
“We believe that local infrastructure—solutions that run on the player’s device rather than in the cloud—will have the upper hand over other business models in the AI gaming industry, and Tryll is well positioned to set a standard in this space. A developer who today spends three months integrating a cloud-based LLM into their game will be able to install a Tryll plugin and have a working version ready in a week. Tryll has the potential to fundamentally change this industry, and we are excited to have the opportunity to invest in this company,” said Cristian Munteanu, Managing Partner at Early Game Ventures.
The investment will primarily be used for product development and expanding the go-to-market team.
The team
Tryll was founded by a multicultural team of gaming enthusiasts with impressive experience—from serial entrepreneurs to founders of their own game studios—who have brought together remarkable talent behind some of the industry’s most iconic titles, including Baldur’s Gate, Diablo, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Project Zomboid, and the Endless series.
“Cloud-based artificial intelligence is designed for SaaS, where every interaction has a token cost attached. Games don’t work that way—no studio can afford to pay for every conversation in every tavern across millions of devices. In gaming, tokens need to be free; otherwise, the financial model simply doesn’t work. The new era of AI in gaming leverages the player’s GPU, and Tryll is building exactly that layer of infrastructure,” said Alexandr Glotov, CEO and co-founder of Tryll.
