Irish start-up W4 Games has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to support development of open-source game engine Godot and build new tools and services for developers.
The company, formed in 2021, is led by co-CEO Nicola Farronato and Godot veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli. It’s currently working on products and services such as middleware console porting solution W4 Consoles and W4 Cloud.
It also aims to expand across North America, Europe and Asia, as well as develop a new Godot education program. The studio plans to double its headcount over the next 18 months.
The funding round was led by OSS Capital and AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant. The round also included GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, OpenSea co-founder Alex Atallah, ex-Elastic senior VP of worldwide sales Justin Hoffman, former SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin, Anchorage Digital founder Diogo Mónica and ex-GitLab chief product officer Scott Williamson, amongst others.
Godot will “scale exponentially”
“We at W4 Games are going all-in on the creation of an ecosystem with the Godot Engine at its center,” read a statement from W4 Games.
“The free, open-source technology of the Godot Engine empowers developers to create stunning 2D and 3D games, and we believe it will become the most used game engine in the world within the decade, driving video game development to new heights.
“It is already the preferred game engine for new generations of game developers and will scale exponentially further thanks to its fast learning curve, intuitive design, and a fast-growing and welcoming community.”
Godot recently saw a boost in popularity, sparked by rival Unity’s controversial runtime fee policy announcement, which the company later revised.
Following that decision, AppLovin, a rival in the mobile ads space, released a new tool to help developers migrate their Unity projects away from Unity to Godot and Unreal Engine.
