Moonlake AI Launches from Stealth with $28M Seed to Let Anyone Vibe Code Interactive Worlds in Minutes

Moonlake AI, a new artificial intelligence research lab, today emerged from stealth with $28 million in seed funding from AIX Ventures, Threshold, NVIDIA Ventures, and more than a dozen leading AI researchers and founders. Moonlake is building AI models for creating real-time interactive content including simulations and games, enabling anyone to vibe code interactive worlds in minutes. Moonlake AI’s reasoning models lower the barrier to creative coding and opens interactive world-building to developers, designers, and fans without requiring programming or domain knowledge.

Moonlake’s angel investor, the founder of YouTube Steve Chen says he’s “Personally excited by the mass potential that Moonlake AI is working to unlock. Similar to YouTube opening up a platform for the world to watch and share videos, I look forward to Moonlake AI doing the same for interactive content.”

The First Reasoning Model for Creating Real-time Interactive Content

Moonlake has the first reasoning model that allows anyone to create immersive environments with interactivity in minutes. The implication is that users and developers simply describe what they want whether it’s games or robotics simulation, and the system compiles it into a working 3D or 2D scene they can interact with right away. Edits are instant, physics can be changed, and more. Under the hood, the platform uses multi‑modal reasoning for spatial layout, tool use over modern engines to build assets and scenes, program synthesis for logic, a simulation layer for agents, and a real-time diffusion model to reskin the world. This makes it just as useful for prototyping games as it is for spinning up simulations to train reinforcement learning and embodied AI agents.

“Moonlake is marrying vibe coding and world generation to create the ultimate reinforcement learning environments,” said Mo Islam, Partner at Threshold Ventures. “This unlocks entirely novel forms of agents in both the digital and physical worlds.”

“Simulations and games are an extension of our ideas,” said Fan‑Yun Sun, co‑founder of Moonlake AI. “We want anyone to sketch a feeling or mechanic and be able to simulate it within minutes. That unlocks new workflows and gives AI agents the interactive environment it needs to learn.”

The Future of Interactivity: From $1B+ Franchise Games to 1B+ creators

Building interactive worlds is slow and expensive. A single franchise game can require billions of dollars and hundreds of people. Prototyping alone can take years of work. Budgets swell across engines, asset pipelines, content creation, scripting, QA, and live‑ops. Small changes ripple through code, art, physics, and tooling, so iteration slows from days to weeks. Missed milestones stack up. One slip can blow a budget or a launch window. The result is that most teams can’t test ideas quickly, and many ideas never ship. Only a few studios can afford to take big creative swings, let alone indie developers and the 1B+ individual creators – these are the problems Moonlake is looking to solve with its model.

“Game design is about to become 10X better with Moonlake’s AI platform,” said Shaun Johnson. “This will enable consumers and professional game designers to create high grade games using natural language. Moonlake is at the frontier of AI game design.”

“Too many great worlds never made it past the sketchpad,” said Sharon Lee, co-founder of Moonlake AI. “It is not for lack of imagination, but for lack of the right tools.”

Initial use cases for Moonlake’s platform include:

• User-generated interactive worlds, supporting the growth of micro fandoms
• Interactive world creation for video game developers, studios, and IP holders
• Robotics and embodied‑AI simulations for training and evaluation
• Creation of 3D environments for film and animation companies
• Teachers creating immersive learning experiences

Moonlake AI was founded by Fan-Yun Sun and Sharon Lee, both working out of Stanford AI Lab. Sun earned his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford while working as a researcher at NVIDIA on the Learning & Perception Research Team and Metropolis Deep Learning (Omniverse), leading efforts to generate large-scale 3D worlds for training AI agents and foundation models. Lee was pursuing a CS PhD focused on generative AI and computer graphics, combining diffusion models with 3D engines. She also develops foundation models trained to reason about space, enabling richer interactivity and control in virtual worlds.

Along with the lead VC investors, Moonlake’s round includes more than a dozen industry leaders and unicorn founders such as Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist at Google Research), Steve Chen (Founder of YouTube), Naval Ravikant (Founder of AngelList), Ian Goodfellow (Inventor of GANs), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Vercel), alongside executives from Hugging Face, Stability AI, Deepmind and OpenAI.

Moonlake AI is currently in private preview. Demos and additional information, including the brand video and social media links, are available below. Interested creators, developers, studios, and research partners can request early access at https://www.moonlakeai.com/.

About Moonlake AI

Based in San Francisco, Moonlake AI is an applied research lab pushing the boundaries of AI, reinforcement learning (RL), and creativity. They are a world-class team of researchers and engineers, all distinguished as best paper award winners, ACM ICPC medalists, or Olympiad medalists. Moonlake AI builds multi-modal reasoning models that enable creators and developers to build rich interactive experiences without needing 3D modeling or coding skills, and enabling AI agents to learn in user-generated RL environments. From enabling fan-driven micro-worlds, to training simulations in robotics, Moonlake is unlocking new realms of utility and cultural expression at the intersection of AI, creativity, and play. The company has raised a $28 million seed round from Threshold, AIX, and Nvidia Ventures and other leading AI researchers and founders.

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