Swedish startup coherence raises €7.4M to help make and run scalable multiplayer games in minutes; here’s how

Malmo, Sweden-based coherence, a startup working on the development of a framework for game developers, announced on Thursday that it has raised $8M (approximately €7.4M) in a fresh round of funding to support the development of its network technology.

According to a statement, the funds will support coherence to grow its team and roll out its technology to game creators, offering opportunities to democratise the development of real-time multiplayer experiences.

Investors

The round was led by Griffin Gaming Partners, a venture capital firm that focuses on investing across the broad gaming ecosystem. The round also saw participation from a number of other investors. 

coherence says that it is delighted to work with Griffin as it is renowned for its expertise and knowledge in identifying breakthrough companies. Griffin’s investment portfolio company includes Discord and Overwolf, among others.

Anthony Palma, Partner at Griffin, says, “We are thrilled to be working with the talented team at coherence to create the next generation of multiplayer technology for games. As a former game developer, I know the challenges Dino and his team are addressing for creators firsthand. We are excited to see them empower more game makers to build scalable and complex multiplayer experiences with coherence.”

Make and run scalable multiplayer games in minutes

coherence is a network engine, a platform, and a series of tools and plugins for a game development environment built to democratise the way developers make connected experiences. The company’s mission is to give any game developer, regardless of how technical they are, the power to make a connected game.

The company was founded in 2018 by Playdead co-founder Dino Patti, after a series of conversations with Unity’s founder David Helgason. coherence’s C-level team includes co-founder and CTO Tadej Gregorcic, who has worked with Supercell, LG, and Adidas, as well as COO Senta Jakobsen, with experience at Radical Entertainment, DeNA, Crytek, THQ Nordic, and DICE.

coherence is an open and scalable platform for building multiplayer games and virtual worlds. It will initially launch with a Unity SDK and plug-in (with other platforms to follow) and allows developers to have a working multiplayer prototype running in a matter of minutes. The platform claims to make creating, testing, and deploying networked games easier than before, making multiplayer game development accessible to all.

Dino Patti says, “Real-time multiplayer experiences still have significant untapped potential. There are so many hurdles when it comes to making multiplayer games that can effectively shut down the creative process early on in a game’s development. With coherence, we want to break those barriers.”

At its core, coherence claims to have a ‘powerful’ network engine designed to maximise performance and minimise bandwidth usage. It is based on an entity-component-system architecture and bitstreams with delta compression, quantisation, runtime frequency control, LOD-ing, interest management and many other features. 

The coherence backend infrastructure automatically scales anything from session-based games to virtual worlds and allows developers to easily upload and share their game builds.

Currently, coherence has a number of new job openings. You can apply here.