Jul 3, 2023

ElectricNoir raises £4.5m, rebrands to Scriptic Phone-first interactive shows for mainstream audiences backed by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from Tower 26 and Amazon Alexa Fund Share: A London-based studio developing interactive phone-first shows has raised £4.5 million in seed funding and rebranded to Scriptic. ElectricNoir was founded by Nihal Tharoor (CEO) and Benedict Tatham (chief creative officer), who saw a latent opportunity in the entertainment space: immersive, phone-first interactive shows that sit at the intersection of film and games, and put audiences in control of the action. For the company’s BAFTA-nominated Dead Man’s Phone, 80% of players identify as true crime fans rather than gamers. In the show, which was recently re-released as the highly popular Scriptic: Crime Stories on Netflix as part of the streaming service’s games offering, players become the lead detective in a gritty crime drama, solving murders through victims’ smartphones. The company has also launched a number of episodic and short-form titles across a range of genres through its proprietary Scriptic app, which has reached 1.5 million organic installs across Apple and Android to date. Scriptic is one of the first entertainment companies to leverage generative AI tools in a production capacity, having first used ChatGPT and DALL-E in 2021 to help with content production. The studio’s Dark Mode horror anthology, launched in January, not only leveraged AI for content production but also used it as a creative tool; human creatives worked with the likes of DALL-E, ChatGPT, and Murf.ai to create the series’ visual art, voice acting and text.