Announcing Weekend's $55M Series C

Written by

Max Child & James Wilsterman

Published on:

July 9, 2024

min read

Table of Contents

Table of content

An Update from Weekend’s Founders on our Recent Series C Fundraise

We’re pleased to announce that we have raised a $55 million Series C. We founded Weekend with the belief that voice-controlled games can bring people together in ways that feel truly human—and this is happening: Weekend have been played in over 30 million homes.

Our games feature an AI voice interface—rather than traditional touch screens or handheld game controllers—which makes Weekend instantly accessible to a broad audience. Five-year-olds are playing alongside ninety-five year olds.

With this latest round of funding, we can accelerate our development of new voice-controlled, AI-powered games. Behind the scenes, we use speech recognition, natural language processing, large language models, and speech synthesis to create seamless, simple, joyful entertainment. The technology melts away so that players can bond with friends and family.

We’ve already launched our own branded titles like Question of the Day and Karaoke, and turned cherished, iconic TV shows like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! into games that can be played by shouting answers from your couch. And last December, we launched 20 Questions for Alexa, featuring an entirely LLM-powered host.

Our recent fundraise will allow us to invest even further in creating advanced LLM-powered non-player characters and best-in-class speech recognition. In fact, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen the industry converge on our view that speech is the best way for consumers to interact with artificial intelligence. Recent GPT-4o and Gemini demos show that leading AI research labs are training large language models to directly support powerful voice interactions out-of-the-box.

Our profound thanks goes out to those investors who have put their faith in our amazing team. The round is co-led by Microsoft’s M12 Ventures, who will be joining our Board, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, who are backing our business for the third time in four years. General Catalyst, Causeway Media Partners, the Amazon Alexa Fund, BITKRAFT Ventures, Y Combinator, Boost VC, Alumni Ventures, Waverley, Gaingels, Advancit Capital, and Riverside also participated in the round.

It's thrilling to see that some of the most important players in the AI and voice technology world—M12 Ventures and Amazon—are backing Weekend. Both have the insight and scale to support us as we leverage the latest generative AI and voice AI technologies to build a global business that reaches millions of players.

Our mighty team based in San Francisco needs to grow to bring even more high-quality voice game experiences to TVs, Alexa devices, and beyond. We believe that generative AI, large language models, and enhanced speech synthesis technologies are going to fundamentally change the way people play games at home. Please check out our job postings over the coming weeks and months as we open multiple roles in our Product, Engineering, Data, Growth, and Operations teams to propel us forward.