London-based Improbable, a metaverse technology company, announced on Thursday that it has raised $150M (approximately €138.11M) in a fresh round of funding to establish and develop M² (MSquared), a network of interoperable Web3 metaverses powered by its Morpheus technology.
According to the startup, M² will allow companies, brands and creators to establish their own metaverses and Web3 businesses within its network, organise large-scale experiences with their communities involving thousands of players, and provide interoperability with existing blockchains and Web3 businesses.
Investors in this round
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. A cohort of Web3 and crypto investors, including Mirana, DCG, CMT, SIG and Ethereal Ventures also participated. Besides, Saranac partners, a private office for entrepreneurs and family capital, Round13 DAF, Zinal Growth, the tech investment vehicle of Guillaume Pousaz, and David E. Rutter also joined in on the round.
Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says, “Giving people the tools to design their own metaverses at the scale that Improbable enables, with web3 interoperability and composability to expand on each other’s creations, will result in some truly groundbreaking virtual experiences. We are long-term backers of Improbable, and under Herman’s leadership, the team is making their lofty visions a reality.”
According to Chris Kurdziel and Jon Allen of Mirana Ventures, “Improbable is enabling new types of shared immersive experiences that will accelerate a wide variety of emergent user behaviours, many of which are already taking root in the Web3 world. These include fair player-governed communities, complex player-driven economies & open developer-powered experiences. Improbable is the first team to pull this off technically, at scale, in production. As major supporters of BitDAO, we are excited to support the Improbable team — and by extension, all future players that will come to rely on Improbable’s technology — in the years to come.”
Enabling the metaverse revolution
Founded in 2012 by Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead, Improbable is a metaverse technology company that partners with video game developers, entertainment companies, and defence and academic institutions to enable virtual worlds of unprecedented size and usefulness.
Herman Narula says, “We founded Improbable to make real the promise of incredible online worlds that were more than just games – they were extensions of our lives. I believe the metaverse and Web3 movement, though very early, represent a once-in-a-generation redefinition of our society towards a ‘fulfilment economy’ where experiences made by an open network of creators and businesses can create enormous opportunities for everyone. M² is our contribution to establishing this future and we hope to help our partners catalyse an open metaverse with many participants and success stories.”
The M² network will combine Improbable’s Morpheus technology with new services designed to support interoperability, commerce in digital assets, and governance in Web3. It will bring together companies, existing communities and fans in sports, music, fashion and entertainment, and enable them to interact in dense virtual spaces with unprecedented fidelity.
The network is being designed to support integration with existing worlds as well as new projects. Improbable has established M² as a distinct entity to better enable governance in partnership with other businesses and, eventually, with its community.
Improbable claims to be a leading provider of multiplayer services to over 60 global publishers and supports the UK government defence mission through its large scale simulation platform. Its Morpheus technology, an evolution of the company’s earlier SpatialOS product, supports over 10,000 players, who are able to interact with each other in dense virtual spaces.
The platform processes over 350 million communication operations per second (or ops) and was first demonstrated in live events with thousands of players in 2021. In January, 2022, Improbable announced its transformation to accelerate in the metaverse.
Previous fundings
In 2015, Improbable received a $20M Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz. Other Series A investors include Horizons Ventures and Temasek.
In 2017, the startup raised $502M in its Series B funding, led by SoftBank, with follow-on investments from Horizons Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
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