An operator, deliberately standing behind the studio.
There is an obvious company to build here and we are not building it. The obvious one is a catalogue: sign many studios, sign many labs, sit in the middle. It would grow fast and it would be unusable by exactly the customers it needs.
benned is a Dutch company that turns licensed commercial games into private AI training environments and operates them. The studio licenses its game to the AI lab directly and keeps the customer relationship; benned makes the game agent-ready, runs one isolated copy per lab on dedicated hardware in the Netherlands, and earns alongside the studio rather than between it and its customer.
A frontier lab will not train in a room it shares.
How a lab's agents behave is the research. Any provider running environments for several labs is in a position to watch it, and the labs know that. So the structure has to make the leak impossible rather than forbidden: separate hardware, no stored agent data, keys held by the lab, and a licence that runs between the lab and the studio instead of through us.
How the separation is builtNo catalogue, no aggregate, no network effect.
Each engagement is its own build on its own hardware, and nothing we learn from one lab can be resold to the next. That is a slower business than a marketplace. It is also the only version of it a serious lab can sign, which makes it the one worth building.
Two things, one problem.
- 1
Licensed game worlds
Commercial games made agent-ready for a specific lab: headless, faster than real time where the engine allows, with resets, seeds and scored tasks. What labs get.
- 2
benned Worlds
Our own environments, built for long-horizon planning rather than adapted to it. The first is BuildSite, a construction project an agent has to finish on time and on budget. What we are building.
Daniël Paaij, founder.
benned is built and run by Daniël Paaij from 's-Hertogenbosch, in the Netherlands. A studio deciding whether to license a game it spent years on, and a lab deciding whose hardware its agents will run on, are both asking the same question: who is actually on the other side of this?
So there is a name on it. Every enquiry that comes through the form is read and answered by him, not by a queue, and the decision not to build the catalogue version of this company was his to make and is his to defend.
- One person answersEnquiries are read and replied to within two working days, by the person who can actually say yes.
- Based where the work runs's-Hertogenbosch, with lab environments on dedicated hardware in a Tier III facility in the Netherlands.
- Writes what is published hereThe guides and notes on this site are his, including the parts that argue against the easier version of this business.
's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.
Studios: tell us which titles you could license. Labs: tell us what your agents need to learn. We reply within two working days.
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