CALGARY — Artificial.Agency, a one-year-old Edmonton startup developing behavioural AI for gaming, is in advanced talks to secure investment worth up to US$12 million in a fundraising round led by the venture arm of auto giant Toyota, The Logic has learned.

Returning investors Radical Ventures, headquartered in Toronto, and Seattle-based Flying Fish Partners are in discussions to participate, according to two sources with knowledge of the financing. The Logic agreed not to identify the sources because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. 

Artificial.Agency co-founders Brian Tanner, Alex Kearney, Mike Johanson and Andrew Butcher worked together at the Edmonton lab of Alphabet’s DeepMind AI unit. They launched the startup last April, after the search giant closed DeepMind’s Edmonton office. Tanner and Kearney studied under University of Alberta professor Richard Sutton, the leading authority on the field of reinforcement learning, a method of teaching AI programs through repetition. 

Game-playing was among the first examples of the technique’s effectiveness. Artificial.Agency, according to its website, is using AI to build the next generation of games, letting developers create “responsive game environments.”

The startup is working on behavioural AI that game studios could use to create and govern players’ in-game interactions, promising environments that respond to their decisions and “more human” non-playable characters. It had 14 staff as of April, according to social media posts.

Last year, Artificial.Agency raised around $US4 million in an initial round led by Radical, while Flying Fish also invested in the firm, one of the sources said. Federal corporate filings show the startup listed Radical managing partner Jordan Jacobs as indirectly controlling more than a quarter of shares starting in May 2023. 

Artificial.Agency’s CEO Tanner, Radical Ventures and Flying Fish declined to comment. Toyota Ventures did not respond to a request for comment

Artificial.Agency’s fundraising comes as the US$200-billion video games industry bets on an AI transformation, with major studios like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft increasingly experimenting with generative tools to build video games at lower cost.

Johanson and DeepMind alumnus Michael Bowling co-authored a 2017 paper in Science about DeepStack, an AI program that learned to outplay humans at Texas Hold’em. As a researcher at the University of Alberta between 2008 and 2016, Johanson helped develop the first-ever such program. Butcher, meanwhile, is a former software developer at Edmonton-based studio BioWare, where he worked on games including Dragon Age: Inquisition and Anthem. 

At DeepMind’s Edmonton office, other researchers developed artificial intelligence capable of beating professional human players at the game of Go, thought to be the world’s oldest board game. Google’s decision to close the lab—which came as the tech giant reoriented its AI efforts to focus on generative models—rocked the local research community and raised questions about the city’s position as a hub of AI talent. 

But key players in the AI ecosystem were confident they would shake off the departure. In an interview with The Logic at the time, Sutton said he expected most or all of the 27 former DeepMind researchers to remain in Edmonton, and that the researchers were now “freed up” to work on other projects. Sutton has since partnered with ex-Meta executive John Carmack—a former game developer best known for titles including Doom and Quake—to lead research efforts at Carmack’s Keen Technologies. 

“I do think that DeepMind’s decision to close the lab is really worse for them than it is for us,” Sutton said at the time. 

Last month, Toyota Ventures announced it had added a second, $150-million frontier fund to back startups in AI, robotics and other technologies. Previous investments include Slamcore, which is building machine vision for location and mapping; Parallel Domain, which generates synthetic data for perception systems; and Common Sense Machines, which makes 3D models from images and video.

Toyota Ventures has disclosed two other Edmonton investments to date, joining bioreactor startup Future Fields’s US$11.2-million round in February 2023 and energy-storage firm e-Zinc’s US$25-million Series A raise in April 2022.