Andreessen Horowitz joins SPARQ's $8.5m seed round as AI-native game engine launches from Innovation City

SPARQ, the next-gen AI-native game engine and creator platform headquartered at Ras Al Khaimah’s Innovation City – the world’s first AI-powered free zone – opens its $8.5-million seed round with early participation by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) scout fund. This is not merely a funding announcement. It is a declaration that the future of human creativity is being written in the UAE, and that the next generation of billion-dollar creative companies – the unicorns of tomorrow – will be born here, in Ras Al Khaimah, at Innovation City.

For decades, making a game has meant years of coding and a full studio. SPARQ changes that math. Its AI-native engine takes on everything that isn’t about game design – code, assets, networking, one-click publishing, instant monetization – while the creator keeps full control of design: how the game feels, how it plays, why it’s worth returning to. That distinction matters. SPARQ is not a prompt-to-game tool that produces a demo and little else. It is a real engine, built so a single creator can ship a game players actually want to keep playing – to any platform.

The round follows two years of building, not pitching. The founders put $2.5 million of their own capital into a proprietary C++ engine with AAA-grade rendering capabilities, assembled a team of more than 20 senior engineers, and drew a waitlist of 6,000 creators, all before taking outside money. Now that SPARQ is finally opening its doors to outside capital, the product is already speaking for itself.

Why a16z moved early

The first conversation was about the problem: a $300-billion industry with no creation tool accessible to the 250 million creators who want in. The broken assumption that game engines must be complex. The thesis that AI-native architecture – purpose-built, not retrofitted –  could turn years of development into weeks.

The second conversation was a live demonstration. SPARQ showed what three million lines of proprietary engine code, 20+ engineers, and $2.5 million of founder capital had produced. A16Z backed SPARQ on the strength of what they saw: a product built by founders who had bet on themselves first.

“Every creative medium has had its unlock – YouTube for video, Shopify for commerce,” says Christopher Pail, Founder & CEO of SPARQ. “Gaming has waited longest, because games are the hardest thing to make. AI changes that, but only an engine built for AI from the ground up can use it to its full extent. SPARQ takes on the production work that always required a studio. What it doesn’t do is replace the creator – their judgment about what makes a game fun is the entire point.”

Christoffer Wilhelmsen, COO and Co-founder of SPARQ, added: “There are 250 million creators making a living from content right now. Almost none of them make games. Not because they lack ideas but because the tools don't exist for them. We built SPARQ to fix that. A real engine, AI-native from day one, not a plugin on top of something old.”

Innovation City: Where unicorns are engineered

SPARQ’s choice of Innovation City was never about convenience. It was about destiny. After building across Europe and beyond, the founders sought the one place on Earth purpose-built for frontier technology: lightning-fast set-up, visionary regulation, and an ecosystem actively shaping the future rather than reacting to it. They found it in Ras Al Khaimah.

Innovation City isn’t just a free zone. It is the incubator of tomorrow’s legends. The place where ambitious founders come to rewrite industries and where the UAE’s boldest vision for global leadership in AI, gaming, and creative technology becomes reality.

“SPARQ is not building a game engine,” said Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City. “They are architecting a movement ­– one that will democratise creation on a planetary scale. This is precisely why we built Innovation City: to be the launch pad for world-defining companies that don’t follow the rules. They write new ones. With a16z’s backing and the involvement of Sheikh Ali Al Qasimi from day one, SPARQ proves that the UAE is not just participating in the future. We are building it first.”

To accelerate this vision, SPARQ and Innovation City are launching the SPARQ Creators Centre in Ras Al Khaimah, a world-class, AI-powered studio hub designed to attract the planet’s most talented creators and engineers, cementing the emirate as the undisputed global capital of next-generation game development.

The future begins now

With beta access rolling out and global launch imminent, SPARQ is focused on one audacious goal: bringing this next-gen platform to the 250 million creators the games industry has ignored for decades.

Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, co-founded with the involvement of Sheikh Ali Al Qasimi, and operating from the beating heart of Innovation City, SPARQ is more than a company. It is a statement to the world: the creative revolution has arrived, and it is launching from Ras Al Khaimah, UAE

The age of gate-kept creation is over. The age of universal creation has begun.