Founders and previous staff of Owlchemy Labs Inc., a virtual reality games studio Google LLC acquired in 2017, have launched a new company called absurd:joy Inc. and announced $5.35 million in funding.

March Gaming led the seed funding round. Other investors include Dune Ventures, WXR Fund, Gaingels, David Helgason and others.

With much of the world is still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the unprecedented shift to remote working remains in effect, and that’s the market absurd:joy is aiming at.

The company, with its interesting name, is aiming to bring “joy to remote collaboration.” Absurd:joy’s founders believe that current virtual office platforms are unsatisfactory, so they decided to build their own.

Absurd:joy’s first product is called Tangle. The product is built to be “playful, joyful and fun” while being optimized for creativity, “natural serendipity and those swivel-around moments that are so difficult to achieve in a virtual/remote setting.” Tangle is also said to focus on user agency, privacy and comfort.

“We created Tangle for ourselves,” absurd: joy founder Cy Wise said in a statement. “To collaborate meaningfully with our team. To jump into side conversations with each other seamlessly. To do focus work without being isolated. To leave notes on each other’s door. To wander by our artist’s desk to see the concept art strung up around it. To laugh at the memes left on whiteboards in meetings we weren’t a part of.”

Wise added that “after months of building games as a team with Tangle as our primary communication platform, our friends began begging us for access and we realized that sharing this tool could bring us, our friends, and many others in many industries, vastly more joy.”

In a less colorful comment, Louis Gresham from March Gaming claimed that the company will revolutionize “the way we work with the same human-centered design approach that made them so successful as pioneering game developers.”

Judging from the arguably one of the strangest press releases ever written, Tangle could perhaps be described as a combination of collaborative whiteboard service with videoconferencing. In the company’s words “a virtual collab space where you hear chatter like a coffee shop.”

The video below demonstrates Tangle. Despite its pitch, there does appear to be some enterprise and serious work elements in the product.

Tangle is currently in closed beta test mode. The product has been tested for the last eight months by companies that include Bad Robot Games, Squanch Games, Lightforge Games and Skymap Games.

Image: absurd:joy