Unity Technologies, the company behind the popular multi-platform game development tool Unity, has announced today that it completed a $181 million Series C round of investment led by DFJ Growth (via Techcrunch). China Investment Corporation, FreeS Fund, Thrive Capital, and Max Levchin were also participating in the round and will join existing investors Sequoia Capital and WestSummit Capital.
According to the New York Times, this new round of investment will bring the company’s valuation around $1.5 billion. Barry Schuler, partner at DFJ Growth, will also take a seat on Unity’s board of directors and released the following statement:
Unity’s platform has revolutionized the game industry by allowing any size studio from Indie to Triple-A to create beautiful and compelling games and experiences and monetize them with their advertising and analytics services. Now Unity is poised to accelerate the advance of AR/VR with their unique ‘write once/ publish many’ engine which allows studios to easily support all hardware platforms without having to attempt to choose a winner.
Unity has indeed been growing quickly over the last few years: the company claims 5.5M registered developers, a 45% global engine market share, and 600 million people playing with games made using Unity worldwide.
While the majority of the top-grossing 3D mobile games are currently made with Unity, the company also estimates that around 90% of the apps made for Samsung’s Gear VR, one of the most popular VR headsets, have also been built with the cross-platform game engine. And yes, even Pokemon GO, the insanely popular mobile VR game that has been making headlines over the last few days, was also built on the Unity platform.
With this new cash, Unity Technologies seems well-positioned to become the ultimate game engine but CEO John Riccitiello shared that the company will continue to focus on their three core principles: “democratizing development, solving hard problems and enabling developer success.” Do you think other game engines such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine will struggle to compete with Unity going forward? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
