Hadean, a London-based deep tech startup, has secured a $30M in a Series A funding round led by Molten Ventures with participation from Epic Games, 2050 Capital, Alumni Ventures, Aster Capital, Entrepreneur First, and InQTel.
The fresh capital from Series A will help the UK company to build out its record-breaking metaverse infrastructure technology. Further, the Epic Game’s investment will help Hadean build out the company’s scalable, interoperable and secure metaverse capabilities.
Craig Beddis, co-founder and CEO, says, “Hadean’s mission is to bridge physical and virtual worlds – to help us make better decisions and ultimately improve the quality of our lives in the physical world. Today’s virtual worlds are a limited experience – small scale, siloed, and insecure. Hence why these are the technical challenges, we’re tackling today. But we believe the true success and mass adoption of the metaverse will rely on the ease by which creators can build their own experiences at scale, leveraging open and robust metaverse-as-a-service technologies. We’re delighted to work with industry leaders like Epic Games, who share our ethos and ambition for this reality.”
Epic Game’s contribution
As the London startup amassed $30M funding, we at Tech Funding News reached out to Mimi Keshani, co-founder and COO at Hadean, to know more about the Epic Game’s impact on the startup.
Keshani says, “Hadean has been working with Epic and their Unreal Engine for years and have previously received a large MegaGrant. The record-breaking 14,000-player demo with CCP Games was all built on Unreal Engine, smashing the 100-player server limit they have today. The investment accelerates our shared ambition for a scalable metaverse.”
He continues, “We believe that the metaverse is the next iteration of the internet and will not be created or owned by a single entity or be exclusive in any way, shape, or form. Epic Games share this philosophy and want to empower the next generation of creators and developers to build this future powered by next-gen components like Hadean. But unfortunately, today’s virtual worlds are a limited experience – small scale, siloed, and insecure. Hence why these are the technical challenges we’re tackling today.”
He adds, “The true success and mass adoption of the metaverse will rely on the ease by which creators can build their own experiences at scale, leveraging open and robust metaverse-as-a-service technologies. We’re excited to be the infrastructure powering the first wave of these experiences with partners like Pixelynx’s music verse and Gamescoin’s web3 gaming platform.”
Infrastructure for metaverse
Founded in 2015, Hadean has developed vital metaverse components and signed multi-year agreements in entertainment (Minecraft, Pixelynx, Sony, and Gamescoin), as well as with education and enterprise digital twin providers.
Explaining the concept behind Hadean, Keshani shares, “Hadean’s technology is led by the vision of an open, decentralised and accessible metaverse where creators have the tools to build and expand virtual worlds and users can enjoy new social experiences. True to this philosophy, the Hadean Platform is reimagining distributed, spatial, and scalable computing for Web 3.0 and the metaverse by unlocking the ability for designers and developers to create interoperable and secure immersive 3D environments without worrying about current server limitations, e.g., poor AI, limited concurrent players, slowing down gameplay.”
The company has worked with EVE Online maker CCP Games to break their record for the most number of players in a single-sharded world with a 14,000-player dog fight in space, live at Game Developers Conference 2019, a record still unbroken today.
The company’s distributed cloud platform enables scalability, security, and interoperability, driving the metaverse and immersive digital experiences for enterprise, commercial, gaming, and government customers.
Hadean has worked with organisations such as Microsoft, Minecraft, Epic Games, Sony, Gamescoin, Pilxelynx, Francis Crick, CAE, BAE, and Thales.
Future
Hadean intends to scale customers, partners, and revenue and accelerate our ability to break boundaries with our tech.
“In 2022, we’re focussed on building out our integrations with the ecosystem of world-class tools in this space from games engines to clouds, data providers, and more, and are delighted to work more closely with industry leaders like Epic Games and better serve the market together,” he says.
David Cummings, Venture Partner at Molten, says, “Molten has been a part of Hadean’s journey since early 2019. Since then, we have seen the Hadean team deliver ambitious technical milestones, build an impressive customer base across several sectors and continue to attract dynamic talent. It is a pleasure to continue supporting Hadean as it grows.”
