Unity builds developer tools and a game engine that the company says is used to create about half of all video games. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and employs more than 2,000 people. Unity’s private valuation reached $6 billion after a $150 million Series E closed in May. Management is arranging a separate up-to-$525 million tender offer to provide liquidity for common shareholders, primarily current and former employees. The tender is being underwritten by several large institutional investors and will depend on employee participation. The move has prompted speculation that Unity may be delaying an IPO timeline; the company had previously been reported to target an IPO in early 2020. The company has previously raised hundreds of millions to buy back employee shares. Recent governance and leadership scrutiny followed a lawsuit filed by a former executive alleging sexual harassment by CEO John Riccitiello. Unity is a 13-year-old, San Francisco–based developer-platform whose core product is a game engine that handles games' basic operations and accelerates development. Its engine powers half of all new mobile games and 70% of virtual- and augmented-reality experiences. Unity's games and apps reach 2.4 billion devices quarterly, and mobile developers using its technology generated $12.4 billion in net revenue over the last two years. The company says the new funding will be used to pursue what it sees next, including increasingly pervasive 3D visuals. Unity competes with entrants such as Amazon's Lumberyard and Autodesk's Stingray. CEO John Riccitiello, a former Electronic Arts chief and early Oculus investor, leads the company. Unity Technologies develops a cross-platform game engine and development platform for building and distributing interactive experiences across many devices. The company has become a de facto choice for game developers, with over 5.5 million registered developers and an estimated 90% share of Gear VR content. Unity has aggressively embraced mobile and is positioning itself to accelerate AR/VR adoption through a 'write once/publish many' approach that supports multiple hardware platforms. High-profile AR experiences and games, including Pokémon Go, have been built on Unity’s engine. Financially, Unity closed a $181 million Series C at a reported $1.5 billion valuation, a round that dwarfs its prior total capital raised of $25.5 million. As part of the financing, DFJ Growth will take a board seat. Unity Technologies builds a 3D game development platform and engine used by game developers worldwide. The company was founded in Copenhagen and is currently headquartered in Silicon Valley. Unity reports about 500,000 registered seats and roughly 150,000 monthly active seats; notable games built on Unity include Bigpoint’s Battlestar Galactica and Gazillion’s Marvel Super Hero Squad, and EA has a broad deal to use Unity tools. Today 12,000 of the company’s active developers are in China, and management expects China-based developers to represent 40% of Unity’s business within 18 months. To support that expansion it raised a $12 million second round of financing from Asian investors. Previous investor Sequoia Capital also participated in the round. Unity Technologies builds a 3D game development platform that lets developers create games for multiple platforms including the iPhone, PC, Mac and Nintendo’s Wii. The company has seen strong growth on the iPhone, where over 250 games now use the Unity toolset and Unity says those games can see up to a 3x performance boost versus other solutions. Notable titles built with Unity include Cartoon Network’s FusionFall and EA Games’ Tiger Woods; the TC50 finalist Hangout.net also uses the platform. Technically, Unity uses Mono (an open-source .NET implementation) for scripting, which the company says allows code to be JIT- or AOT-compiled to native code while remaining sandboxable and easy to use, and it offers extensive documentation and libraries. The company recently moved its home base from Copenhagen to San Francisco while keeping its core development team in Copenhagen. Financially, Unity has closed a $5.5 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital as reported in the article.

Total raised

$599M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

May 2017