The 4th Quarter: Latest In Sports Tech This Week, March 28th, 2025

AI Gaming Agent Startup For Game Development, Hot M&A Activity, New Job Board

Mar 28, 2025

AI Gaming Agents - The Future of Video Games

In August, Nunu.ai introduced May, a fully autonomous AI gaming agent that beat 3 gym challenges in Pokemon Emerald in just 5 hours & 15 minutes - setting an AI world record.

Last week, they just raised a $6M Seed Round from a16z speedrun, the premier gaming accelerator, cementing themselves as one of the hottest names in gaming tech.

But hold on - three out of the eight gym challenges? In a kids’ game?

What’s all the hype about?

Quality Assurance (QA) Is the Bane of Every Gaming Studio’s Existence

Before a game ever hits the market, studios spend months making sure it actually works.
That means checking for bugs, stress-testing game performance, and ensuring new updates don’t break the game.

Here’s the thing: this process is slow, expensive, and brutal for all stakeholders involved.

In our deep-dive on mobile gaming, we flagged testing as a major bottleneck to a game’s lifecycle: testing alone can stretch a game’s timeline by 3-6 months.

And the costs associated with QA are just as cumbersome. Studios typically follow the 10% rule, allocating 10% of their development budget just for testing. This covers testers (rule of thumb is 1 tester per 5 developers), training, and testing equipment.

For indie studios, that number often balloons to 20% as smaller teams are less defined. Instead, the dev team has to step in as the testers - and devs are a lot more expensive.

To put this in perspective, if an indie game spent $500K on a gaming project, ~$100K goes to QA alone.

And the worst part? QA work is incredibly grueling: long hours + little pay.

Photo Creds: CharlieIntel on X

AI Gaming Agents Will Get QA Testing Done For You

Nunu.ai’s AI gaming agents fully automate testing for studios. No more testers grinding through bugs; the AI agents will take care of it.

The process is quite straightforward.

Onboarding: Nunu.ai onboards the gaming studio, integrating its SDK and educating the customer on how to use the platform
1. 2 weeks for full onboarding
2. <5hrs for SDK integration

Testing: The studio uses AI gaming agents to create test cases through natural language processing:
- For example, the studio can prompt the agent with “play the tutorial”, and the agent will proceed by playing the game’s tutorial
- The gaming agent provides a gameplay recording, logic behind each action, error logs, and a test report

Alerts: The agent instantly notifies the team of any identified bugs via Slack or Jira, or any tool the studio prefers

The agent runs three types of tests:
1. Functional: Flags bugs in the gameplay
2. Regression: Nightly checks to ensure updates don’t break game mechanics
3. Performance: Tracks key metrics like FPS (frames per second), GPU load, and memory usage

In a partnership with Roboto Games, who are building a highly anticipated open-world survival game Stormforge, Nunu.ai:

Reduced cost of QA testing by 50%
Reclaimed 160+ monthly QA hours through automation
Administered 400 quality game tests every month

Nunu.ai’s team is relentlessly iterating on its gaming agents. The goal? Fully-autonomous gaming agents that can play and compete with real players.

Sports-Tech Market Activity: Investors & Deals

Venture Capital

Underdog Fantasy, an online daily fantasy sports platform hits unicorn valuation, raising $70M of expected $100M in Series C funding round (Mar. 26th)
- Plans to invest rapidly in ramping up talent and product growth
- Investment led by Spark Capital, valuing company at $1.23B just 5 years after its founding [Sportico]
Playback, a streaming platform dubbed ‘Twitch for sports’ that allows creators to live-stream games alongside fans, raised $22M in Seed/Series A funding (Mar. 27th)
- Supplementing new deal with MLB, making Playback the first platform to let creators live stream MLB.TV games with fans
- Investment backed by Khosla Ventures and Seven Seven Six; other investors include NBA Investments among others [SBJ]
Hook, a music tech platform that empowers artist monetization via fan-generated remixes, secures $3M in additional funding, bringing total funding to $6M (Mar. 26th)
- Driving marketing expansion and strategic hiring, boosting user acquisition
- Investment backed by Khosla Ventures, Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew, and Raine Group alongside existing investors including Point72, and Waverley Capital among others [Hook]

Pro Padel League, a North American-based padel league secures $10M seed round to drive expansion ahead of its second season (Mar. 26th)
- Plans to increase prize money by 30% to $1M and expand to five events across NA, including Mexico, Miami, and NY
- Investment led by Left Lane Capital; other investors include Gary Vaynerchuk, and Kactus Capital among others [SBJ]
SalesRevv, a B2B CRM fitness sales platform that develops AI agents for customer communication across various mediums, raised $3.24M in Seed funding (March 24th)
- Scaling development, marketing, and AI capabilities for fitness franchises; offering sales support via email, text, and membership registration
- Investment led by RTP Global and Floodgate [Athletech]
G2 Esports, a Europe-based esports club competing in League of Legends, Valorant among others, secures ‘seven-figure’ Series B funding (Mar. 24th)
- Venturing into new titles, global expansion, direct-to-fan offerings, and Call of Duty League investment
- Investment led by WISE Ventures; other investors include The Tornante Company and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk among others [G2 Esports]

M&A and Investments

Silver Lake takes Endeavor private, forming WME Group (Mar. 24th)
- Along with partners, acquiring 100% of Endeavor's outstanding shares at $27.50
- Group consolidates agencies, including WME, IMG, and Pantheon Media Group
- Investment backed by Mubadala, Lexington Partners, and CPP Investments among others [SBJ]
NBA considers potential ‘$3B revenue’ opportunity through proposed European league expansion, advised by Raine Group (Mar. 25th)
- NBA owners reviewing plan for a new 8-10 franchise league
- Proposal values permanent franchise slots at $500M+; NBA to hold 50% equity
- "Semi-open" format could allow EuroLeague teams like Real Madrid and Olympiacos to compete [Sportico]

STRIKR, a new boxing format using data-driven scoring, eyes $50M in funding to drive objective, transparent decision-making (Mar. 24th)
- Tech will track punch trajectory, speed, and force via sensors in mouthguards, partnering with computer vision system, Hawk-Eye
- Investors & potential partners set to attend alpha test event at The Outernet in London this week [Sky News]

Wellhub, a B2B corporate wellness platform, enters ‘definitive agreement’ to acquire European sports and wellness membership platform Urban Sports Club (Mar. 26th)
- Expanding its reach to 34.5K corporate clients and 83K wellness partners
- Urban Sports Club to continue operating independently while supporting Wellhub’s global growth strategy [Wellhub]
Napster, the P2P music-sharing application was acquired by metaverse developer Infinite Reality for $207M to supply metaverse for artists (Mar. 25th)
- Gearing for an era beyond the ‘2D clickable web’ into a ‘conversational 3D one’
- Plans to offer branded 3D virtual spaces for virtual concerts, social listening parties, and other immersive experiences [VentureBeat]

Photo Creds: ASU - ASU and GoDaddy launch a venture studio where student-athletes learn to navigate NIL licensing and build startups.

Strategic Ventures

Arizona State University and internet domain registry GoDaddy launch student-athlete venture studio to propel athlete entrepreneurs (Mar. 26th)
- Offering tools and mentorship to help athletes navigate NIL licensing for business ventures
- Athletes to pitch venture ideas at an annual Demo Day for seed funding opportunity [ASU]
Svexa, a human performance intelligence company, joins NVIDIA’s Inception Program for AI-Powered human performance innovation (Mar. 19th)
- Svexa’s CDO highlights program’s support for expansion into corporate health and senior living markets in the next 12 months; focuses on AI-driven ‘digital twin’ technology for real-time performance recommendations. [Svexa]

Legacy Motor Club, a pro stock car racing team, partners with hydration-tracking wearables company Nix Biosensors via Nix Pro platform data (Mar. 25th)
- LMC’s pit crew to wear Nix hydration sensors during races and training sessions to track sweat composition and electrolyte loss for performance optimization [SBJ]