Founder of Y Combinator-backed Nook returns with new AI startup

Reforged Labs co-founders Oscar Xing Luo (left) and Robert Huynh / Photo credit: Reforged Labs

Robert Huynh, co-founder of Nook – a Vietnamese blue-collar job marketplace backed by Y Combinator – has launched a new AI and gaming startup called Reforged Labs.

This comes several months after Huynh decided to shut down Nook and laid off 22 employees because there wasn’t “a good path to profitability” despite raising US$1 million, he tells Tech in Asia in a recent interview.

With Reforged Labs, Huynh, a Harvard Business School dropout, wants to make software development kits (SDKs) for endless, live gaming content.

“Imagine whenever you’re playing, your past and present actions will be extrapolated and then the game will change based on what you did,” he says.

According to Huynh, Reforged Labs wants to combine generative AI and recommender systems to build SDKs that enable game studios “to produce intelligent characters with dynamic behaviors and truly divergent, branching narratives.”

He cites Baldur’s Gate 3 as an example, which reportedly has 17,000 endings.

“But we want to use AI to create those different possibilities,” Huynh adds. “The pace in which AI moves is extremely fast and with long development cycles at large studios, infrastructure built by one studio may be obsoletely by game release.”

The company plans to use the remaining funding from Nook to get it off the ground as Huynh said his existing investors are all onboard with the new project. Y Combinator already featured Reforged Labs on its website in place of Nook.

Prior to founding Nook in 2021, Huynh spent eight years at Alphabet (Google, moonshot factory X, and self-driving car spinoff Waymo) and Microsoft, including its Xbox division.

Reforged Labs’ other co-founder is Oscar Xing Luo, who spent the last three years building Skapa, a Vietnam-based AI social tech company.

See also: The pitfalls of Vietnam’s GameFi sensation