Investing in Astrocade

How two brothers spent four years building an AI gaming platform that has now ramped from zero to 140M game plays / month and 5M monthly active users

I’ve known Amir Sadeghian, PhD and Ali Sadeghian for almost 4 years now. I met them as they were just getting started on Astrocade. What immediately stood out to me about these founders was their infectious energy, passion for the problem, and technical brilliance.

They told me that AI would be able to generate playable, highly engaging games. The world of AAA studios would disappear, and gaming would be truly democratized. This was the summer of 2022, it was the Stable Diffusion moment, it was before ChatGPT and certainly before Claude Code. It was early days. But I was so captivated by these founders, we would meet for coffee every few months and talk about progress.

I told the founders I’d invest in them as soon as they had product-market fit. I don’t believe in pre-launch consumer investing, it’s too hard. Along the way, I saw magic moments though — their first Mario style game where you could “wish” for things and dynamically change the game itself in real-time. Even though it was not fully ready yet for prime time, it was one of the more eye opening demos that I’d ever seen.

In November, I was having dinner with Amir, and he told me “I think the business is working. I didn’t want to say anything initially, because I wasn’t sure it was real. But it’s been two months now, and the numbers are really inflecting.” Amir, Ali and I had lunch shortly thereafter, amidst the pre-holiday rush. We didn’t eat a bite. Amir turned around his laptop, showed me the Amplitude dashboard, and it was clear that takeoff had begun. Amir came in to present to the Sequoia partners that very afternoon, and we had a term sheet issued the next day.

So many Silicon Valley stories these days are about overnight successes. What’s so inspiring about Astrocade is precisely the four year journey — this is how so many of the best startups are built (Notion and Clay come to mind), but somehow its not really part of the lore of the Valley. We are captivated by the “overnight successes” that aren’t.

In this case, it’s not just the founders, but the entire Astrocade team that stuck with their vision, through thick & thin. When I spend time in the office, I’m always surprised by how long the average tenure is, and how much people stuck with Amir and Ali through many years of struggle, as they iterated on product and rode the wave of underlying model capability improvement.

Now, Astrocade has 5M monthly active users, 140M plays per month (up from 6M per month five months ago and zero before that), and 75k games created on the platform. For fun, we created a Sequoia branded Astrocade game called “Astro Valley” to show off what you can build on the platform.

Come join us! Please reach out at: careers@astrocade.com.

Full playable game: https://www.astrocade.com/games/astro-valley-presented-by-sequoia-capital/01KQVR1ZBRNC8VB5E9TDY0P3Q6?sharedByCreator=alex&platform=web

Fortune Term Sheet writeup: https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/astrocade-raises-56-million-series-b-sequoia-video-games-platform-ali-amir-sadeghian/