Table of contents
- TEAM. “You are not a source of all knowledge in the world, but you can find the experts who will fill the gaps.”
- INVESTORS. “We look into the partnership with investors as into a marriage.”
- TRENDS. “In our case, AI is a tool to tackle a specific issue, not a killer feature.”
- SOLUTION. “The focus is on what really matters.”
- PEOPLE. “Two heads are always better than one when it comes to the birth of new ideas.”
On the face of it, it’s an inspiring story about a small, yet promising startup team that is driven by the desire to simplify content creators’ lives and knows how to overcome the major challenges for the gaming industry.
But the more you talk to one of the Perfection42 co-founders, Simona Vasytė-Kudakauskė, the more you are getting touched by the caring attitude to colleagues, investors, and target audience, overwhelming sincerity, and well-considered actions.
The startup success story turns into inner philosophy that accompanies the Perfection42 team on their way to achieving all the objectives. It might inspire others as well and breathe new life into the motto, ‘Nothing is impossible to a willing heart’.
TEAM. “You are not a source of all knowledge in the world, but you can find the experts who will fill the gaps.”
We are a young company, and the core of us is two co-founders, Kestutis Tauckela and I.
Previously united by the gaming company called Outlander Studios and the common Battle Towers project, we tackled certain issues in the process of game development, which inspired us to create Perfection42.
Starting with game development at the age of 12, now Kestutis has a strong background in this area; he is our mastermind, main driver, and inventor of the AI algorithms we are using.
We are happy to have a network of freelancers we have worked together on previous projects who are still with us and contribute to our goal of making a platform for content creators. 
My cat named Bruknė is also involved — she diligently acts as a good mood evangelist :) Still, even with all our companions around, we do not cover all the knowledge needed. Sales expertise is the thing we are lacking now, but it’s just one of the challenges we hope to overcome in the shortest terms. As we’ve just signed a deal with 70Ventures, their experts will assist in covering this area.
INVESTORS. “We look into the partnership with investors as into a marriage.”
We always do our homework before talking to potential investors. Anyway, you need to cover the basic areas that investors are generally interested in, like a solid plan and understanding of your business, your growth perspectives, and the steps you should take to make it all real.
Don’t hesitate to specify what kind of knowledge you are lacking. When we are thinking about the investors we’d be happy to work with, we look not for the financial support only, but also for the expertise they can share with us. When we bring additional knowledge to our team, it enhances the entire solution and elevates us to the new level.
We are blessed to have four angel investors by our side who willingly share their experience and help from the strategic, technical (specifically, the AI area), B2B, and sales perspectives.
Investors are the people who would be around you for a long time, so why not compare this collaboration to marriage? Our number one rule is the utmost transparency. If you try to conceal some points instead of creating trust with your partners, that might not work in the long term. Everything will become clear pretty soon, during your board meetings or decision-making processes.
TRENDS. “In our case, AI is a tool to tackle a specific issue, not a killer feature.”
We faced a number of issues while creating a game, and each of them required a lot of manual effort. AI came to the rescue as an instrument to ‘relieve the pain’ and automate a vast number of tasks in the game creation process. No one said, “Wow, AI is trending, so let’s engage it in our solution.”
Maybe, if you are followed by trendy tech, you will win (actually, there are investors who believe in hot trends). Personally, I’d rather refrain from dealing with the business people who invest just because we have an AI solution, without digging into the real-life problems Perfection42 solves and bringing any additional value to our team.
SOLUTION. “The focus is on what really matters.”
The concept takes its roots in our gaming past — we faced certain issues and were looking for ways to solve them. In the process, we found out that by employing AI, we can significantly shorten the time needed to finish the tasks in question.
Our aim is to build the ecosystem of content creators, AI providers, and AI trainers to empower them to collaborate and achieve more by automating labor-intensive, repetitive jobs. We know that we have a long way to go, so at the moment, we start focusing on the artists.
We have shown that we can save time for the level creation from 2 days to 2 minutes, speed up updates, and, most importantly, create a better experience for game developers.
Specifically, content creators can avoid troubles related to the graphics; and data trainers utilize AI models for dealing with upscaling issues, 3D style, and denoiser, or other custom problems.
Where are we now? Currently, our team is focusing on launching a web-based solution, refining our business model, and establishing sales processes. The next step in the long term will be moving to more complex tasks, like engine integration, which will help us expand our platform’s boundaries and go beyond the web interface.
PEOPLE. “Two heads are always better than one when it comes to the birth of new ideas.”
The more artists will be involved, the more smart ideas and insights we can accumulate. We already have a crowd of people ready for experiments with the Perfection42 platform, and our team is happy to give them the freedom to act without us as intermediaries.
Our AI trainings have already shown impressive results in animation rendering, for instance. We believe that by inviting the artists with their fresh vision to join the AI training process, we will collect more powerful ideas and strengthen the ecosystem.
