Gardens raises $35m+ Series B led by Lightspeed for a social role-playing game from the makers of Journey and Sky
US-based social role-playing game developer Gardens Interactive has raised more than $35m in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with further closes expected before the end of October. This funding round brought Gardens’ total funds raised to $70.8m, according to InvestGame tracking. Bloomberg reported a $190m pre-money valuation. Lightspeed, which co-led the Series A with Krafton (KOSPI: 259960), expanded its stake. The round is the second-largest of 2026 for a PC & Console games studio tracked by InvestGame, behind only the $100m raised by studio holding company GreaterThan Group.
The round includes Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Accel and Eric Schmidt‘s Innovation Endeavors, alongside Zenith Capital, the firm of Fallout TV series executive producer James Altman, and founders including Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and FunPlus founder Andy Zhong. Stanford University, Sora co-creator Thomas Dimson, and investor Moritz Baier-Lentz also joined the round. Yamauchi No.10, the family office of Nintendo’s founding family (TSE: 7974), invested again. Gardens’ release describes it as the office’s first and only games startup investment in the family’s gaming legacy of over 100 years. V Pappas, a Lightspeed operating partner and former TikTok COO, joins the board, and Krafton’s Mike Hong replaces Maria Park as Krafton’s board representative.
Gardens was founded in May 2021 by brothers Stephen Bell, its CEO, and Chris Bell, its creative director, with Lexie Dostal, and operates as a distributed studio. The team’s credits include the adventure games Journey and What Remains of Edith Finch and the social adventure Sky: Children of the Light. Its debut, a social role-playing game the studio calls a “strandbox”, is in closed pre-alpha, with no title or platforms announced yet, and the funds go to its launch and live operations.
