Announcing Rune and our $8M Raise!

I’m Sanjay, one of the cofounders at Rune. I’ve been hard at work alongside my cofounder Bjarke and the incredible Rune team on our brand new platform. We’re building Rune because social media apps are no longer about friends. They’ve devolved into endless feeds and hours of doom-scrolling. With Rune, we want to build the next best thing to hanging out with friends IRL. An entire generation is growing up on mobile phones. We’d like to bring the joy of hanging out and gaming with friends to millions in the mobile-first generation.

Rune is the best place to talk and play multiplayer games with your friends. Users hang out on Rune's mobile app, sharing laughs on our voice chat as they play amazing indie multiplayer games together! And developers build these games right on the Rune platform.

Developers leverage the Rune SDK to build multiplayer games without needing a single line of backend code. They launch their game on Rune and instantly, thousands of passionate friend groups play it together on voice chat right inside the Rune app! The Rune beta has grown rapidly, with over 50 games built for the platform ranging from multiplayer mini-golf to real-time 3D racing games. The SDK supercharges game creation, with many of our games built in under a week! And these games are played like crazy too — friends have spent over 50 million minutes hanging out and playing our new games together already.

🕰️ Understanding Gen Z

We’re building Rune 2.0 now, because the world has never loved games more. Gen Z really enjoys hanging out on voice chat and playing quirky games together! We learnt this about our users by building our previous app, RuneMatch. RuneMatch grew to over 5M installs before it failed, giving us key insights for Rune 2.0.

RuneMatch was a companion app for popular hardcore mobile games like PUBG and Call of Duty Mobile. Our initial hypothesis was that mobile multiplayer gaming would explode and RuneMatch would help users find teammates to play hardcore games together. As we grew RuneMatch, it became clear that we were wrong about the “hardcore games” part. Our users were playing a long tail of casual games instead. Their focus was not on competitive play, but rather hanging out and being social. The users who stuck around and played the most had a dedicated crew of friends. The games changed every week, but the friend group remained the same and loved playing together.

💡 The Pivot

Playing games socially on mobile is very cumbersome though. On desktop, having multiple apps and hitting alt-tab is dead simple. On mobile, multitasking is broken and switching back-and-forth between a game app and a comms app is painful. You also need to team up twice — once inside the comms app and again inside each game. If you are constantly playing new games, you do this over and over again.

A single app with both great games and excellent comms would be the ultimate mobile gaming experience. This was never an option with hardcore games that are multi-year projects in their own right, but casual games are a lot easier to build. We had our light bulb moment!

This meant a massive pivot. We needed to build an entire multiplayer engine and SDK that would power a large number of casual games running right inside the app. As a gaming-obsessed hardcore MIT / YC startup, this was right up our alley though. We had the technical chops and the passion. This was a product each of us would love to use ourselves. It just felt right and so we took the plunge and pivoted to building Rune 2.0!

🌒 The Rune SDK & App

We’ve been building Rune 2.0 like a team possessed. Our SDK and servers are architected to handle all the painful non-game parts of building a multiplayer game. Developers can build a game as though its being played on a single device. They hook into the Rune SDK which magically handles netcode, scaling and conflict resolution so that the game can scale to millions playing across continents. We achieved this through some really thoughtful architecture under the hood that we painstakingly abstracted away from developers’ plates. For example, all game actions run on both the server and locally on clients, with some neat latency-handling and predict-rollback logic running behind the scenes. Developers can simply register game action code with the SDK and we do the rest, giving players a snappy real-time experience.

Building a previous social app with 5M+ installs taught us a lot. We brought in the best parts, but rewrote it to be even better. We deeply integrated our social features right into the SDK. This creates a truly magical social gaming experience where you can join a voice room and immediately drop into the game your friends are playing with no “team up” needed! You can hop from game to game as you talk. You can dive straight into the action without installing new games. Users feel like they’re literally teleporting from game to game without batting an eye, while talking on the best voice chat available on mobile.

Owning both the SDK and social enables some great features and efficiencies. Our voice chat and SDK reuse the same infrastructure and data channel for server-client comms, making the app really performant. Spectating works automatically with no additional effort from developers. Player avatars work across all games and app UIs too. And we continue to build best-in-class async social features — group chat, online notifications and more — to help you share laughs and plan the next hang!

❤️ An Open Platform

We carefully architected the Rune SDK to run cross-platform — both inside the Rune Android/iOS apps as well as in web browsers. Our SDK acts as the bridge between the game and our native app, so that we can leverage the OS for native performance and robust networking. We abstract this away elegantly, so that developers can hook into our lightweight Javascript SDK and build using their favorite web based libraries without dealing with native iOS/Android code. Web game engines and libraries have matured tremendously and Rune works seamlessly with most popular libraries in the vibrant web gaming ecosystem.

This is a fundamentally different approach compared to other closed platforms. This is the platform we personally want as developers — one where you can use an open stack you already love. We wanted to take away pain points without adding constraints on the types of games you can build. For example, the best experience for players and developers is server-authoritative logic, but this requires taking on the risk of running external code on our servers. Most engines chose to deal with this by locking developers in with their closed framework and placing heavy limitations on what developers can do. Instead, we wanted to let developers build their dream game, so we built out our own autoscaling cloud VM infrastructure that runs game code in a sandbox on our servers. It was hard to set up, but now works amazingly for both players and developers.

We think our approach will truly revolutionize the way multiplayer games are built. Millions of developers already know how to build on the web and can now use their favorite languages and frameworks to build amazing multiplayer games. Every developer’s dream side-project is building a multiplayer game. Rune makes it possible to build one over the weekend, on a familiar stack and suddenly have millions playing it together!

🏦 $8M Fundraise

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $8M in funding for Rune from an amazing group of gaming investors led by byFounders and Makers Fund. We also have some incredible gaming founders like Ben Liu (PocketGems), Thomas Hartwig (King), Adi Rathnam (Kamkord) and others participating in the round.

Our new logo is inspired by the Rune community. Our users love to log in every evening after school to hang out and play with their friends. And our developers love to build in the evening too! We have a growing community of indies, logging in after work or college to build their dream game! Both sides of our platform come alive in the evening, and our logo captures this perfectly.

We’re amped that our vision has expanded. We always wanted to build a place where hundreds of millions of gamers from the mobile generation hung out. But now, we’re also building the place where thousands of developers will build their first ever multiplayer game and turn their dream projects into real games played by millions. With Rune, we hope to truly revolutionize the way multiplayer games are built and played together!

🚀 Rune 2.0 is Live!

Rune 2.0 is now out of beta and is fully available for free on the Play Store and App Store. Anyone can sign up, invite their friends and play 50+ games together! You can seamlessly hop together from game to game, talk on Rune’s voice chat and even spectate as your friends play together.

If you’re a developer who’s always dreamt of building a multiplayer game, join our warm and supportive Discord server and check out our Developer Docs. And if you’re a prospective investor who’s keen to follow our progress, follow @sanjaypojo on X and subscribe to our company updates!