Four veterans of League of Legends maker Riot Games have set up their own studio, Odyssey Interactive, in Canada.

The new venture is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario and has already attracted $6m in seed funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Golden Ventures, as well as a number of angel investors.

Odyssey Interactive has been founded by former Teamfight Tactics product lead Richard Henkel, that game's product manager Dax Andrus, League of Legends' lead champion designer David Capurro and software architect Eric Lawless.

"We believe making games capable of becoming a core part of players' lives comes with an amazing opportunity to not just build deep relationships between players, but also to help them build a better appreciation of everyone that plays the game they do," the founders wrote in a press release.

"Competitive games often come with the stigma of having toxic communities, but we believe that by being very intentional with core design decisions from aesthetics to game features, we can create experiences that invite players from all walks of life in, and not intentionally exclude them in the pursuit of top tier competitive play. This means things like not necessarily building games that require voice chat, or even text chat to be played effectively, and choosing thematics that resonate with a broader audience than most typical competitive titles. To ensure we meet this goal - we’re going to strive to build a diverse team that reflects the audience of the next generation, and not just developers that look like and think like us - because then we’re destined to fall short of our goal."