City From Naught Raises Pre-Seed Funding for AI-Generative 3D Asset Creation Tool Maliang

City From Naught has announced the successful closure of its pre-seed funding round of over $1 million USD for the development of Maliang, an AI-generative tool for 3D artists. The company’s experience during the development of their game, Keyword: A Spider’s Thread, highlighted the need for more efficient and cost-effective creation of 3D assets, which led to the discovery and creation of Maliang.

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City From Naught Inc. is a Toronto-based startup founded by an AI lead engineer from Canadian unicorn company and a machine learning engineer from Google. The company’s first game, Keyword, released in 2021, is a 3D detective puzzle-solving game that features a massive amount of 3D assets. The team noticed that creating 3D models and PBR textures is a tedious but essential job and wished to use machine learning models to automate this process.

Maliang is named after a Chinese mythical figure who can transfer paintings into real-life objects. At City From Naught Inc., the team is inspired by Maliang’s magical brush and believes in the power of tools. The company is founded by a team of machine learning engineers, game developers, and 3D artists who share a passion for gaming and seek efficiency in game development.

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The company’s vision is to bring virtual worlds to life magically, just like the mythical figure. To achieve this, they have created Maliang, a software tool that helps concept artists and 3D artists to automatically generate textures and eventually models based on texts, and communicate their ideas effectively across the team.

Shala, CEO of City From Naught Inc., commented, “We saw an opportunity to empower artists through AI and have already saved up to 40% in asset creation costs for our upcoming game. We believe Maliang will reduce time in 3D asset creation by 90%.”

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