UAE-based startup SPARQ has opened an $8.5M seed round for its AI-native game engine, with early participation from the a16z Scout Fund. The company, founded by Christopher Pail and Christoffer Wilhelmsen and based in Ras Al Khaimah's Innovation City, spent two years building a proprietary C++ engine before raising. Founders contributed $2.5M of their own capital and assembled a 20+ engineer team. SPARQ positions itself as a production-grade engine handling scaffolding, code, assets, networking, multi-platform publishing, and monetization — not a prompt-to-game toy. It faces competition from Roblox's agentic AI tools, Epic's Unreal Engine, and low-code tools like Lemonade and BloxBot. A 6,000-person creator waitlist has signed up for beta access.
