---
title: "SPARQ opens $8.5M seed round for AI-native game engine, with a16z’s scout fund on the cap table"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/sparq-opens-8-5m-seed-round-for-ai-native-game-engine-with-a16z-s-scout-fund-on-the-cap-table-gzffng2n8
source_url: https://thenextweb.com/news/sparq-85m-seed-a16z-scout-ras-al-khaimah
type: article
source: "The Next Web"
published: 2026-05-26T11:28:18.131Z
updated: 2026-05-26T11:28:43.909Z
tags: ["ai", "startup", "game-development"]
reading_time: 3
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# SPARQ opens $8.5M seed round for AI-native game engine, with a16z’s scout fund on the cap table

**[The Next Web](https://daily.dev/sources/tnw)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

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.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thenextweb.com/news/sparq-85m-seed-a16z-scout-ras-al-khaimah>

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---

Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#startup](https://daily.dev/tags/startup), [#game-development](https://daily.dev/tags/game-development)

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