Participated · Seed · May 2023

SuperDuperSecret is building a meta-game platform whose launch title, Royale Chess, is a 10-player battle-royale chess game with synchronous matches and an AI assist to speed moves. Royale Chess is designed to be approachable and fast-paced, targeting casual to midcore players with a Tetris 99–style twist on chess. The company plans to release Royale Chess first on PC and Mac later this year, followed by mobile and console, and to ship additional multiplayer evergreen games across its platform. The team emphasizes creating positive playspaces and social gameplay experiences for millions of gamers worldwide. Founders Jazzlyn O’Reilly (CEO) and Mark McCubbin (CTO) started the company in early 2022 and bring experience on titles including Shadow of the Beast, Dune II, and the NBA2K series. Financially, SuperDuperSecret has raised over $1 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round from a mix of gaming and web3 investors to fund development and launch. The article cites a large market opportunity for chess, noting over 600 million active players and 65 million hours watched annually on streaming platforms.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2022

Tea is a unified package manager, universal interpreter and virtual environment manager built to simplify how developers install and manage software packages. The company launched a CLI last month to challenge incumbents such as NPM and Homebrew and has attracted roughly 16,000 developers who have authenticated their packages with Tea. Tea was formally founded last November in Puerto Rico by Max Howell and Timothy Lewis and emerged from stealth in March backed by $8 million in funding, including participation from the venture capital arm of Binance. The team plans to build a web3 protocol that uses digital contracts and issues NFTs to package maintainers to evidence work and direct rewards, with the protocol’s core components remaining optional. Management says the protocol is expected to be available sometime in 2023 and that Tea will offer revenue-generating services on top of the protocol, including enterprise security and license-management tools. Tea builds an open-source web3 platform to automate sponsorship and compensation for open source developers. Its product issues utility tokens tied to projects and uses digital contracts so sponsors can receive perks like special access or license agreements guaranteeing developer support. Tea maintains a decentralized, immutable graph that registers projects and their dependencies; the company will bootstrap that graph from Homebrew. The platform adds a security layer to notify users and owners when parts of a stack break and includes a slashing mechanism to transfer project control if maintainers are unavailable. Tea describes its model as a "loyalty scheme" and uses an inflationary mechanism to allocate rewards proportionally across the ecosystem. The company is Puerto Rico–based and was co-founded by Max Howell and three fellow engineers; it announced an $8 million seed financing led by Binance Labs.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2022

Improbable develops infrastructure technology for large-scale virtual worlds, evolving its SpatialOS work into the Morpheus platform. Morpheus supports over 10,000 concurrent players and the platform processes over 350 million communication operations per second. The company provides multiplayer services to more than 60 global publishers and supports UK government defence simulations. Improbable is establishing M² (MSquared), a network of interoperable Web3 metaverses, combining Morpheus with services for interoperability, digital-asset commerce and governance. M² is being set up as a distinct entity to enable governance in partnership with businesses and ultimately the community. To fund this initiative Improbable has raised US$150m specifically to establish and develop M². Improbable provides SpatialOS, a cloud platform that enables studios to design, build and manage richer, more immersive virtual worlds beyond the limits of single-server architectures. The platform allows hundreds of game engines running in the cloud to cooperate to simulate much larger, richer worlds and supports standard development tools and game engines. SpatialOS is currently in a free open beta and developers can try the platform via improbable.io/games. Improbable has entered a partnership with NetEase under which NetEase will make games using SpatialOS; the first game using the technology will be announced later this year. The company plans to pursue new business opportunities with videogame developers and publishers in China and the Asia Pacific region. Financially, Improbable has raised multiple venture rounds and most recently received a $50M strategic investment from NetEase. Improbable builds SpatialOS, a distributed cloud platform that lets third parties design and run massively detailed virtual and simulated worlds using machine learning and other advances. SpatialOS, launched last year, targets immersive experiences and has been used in gaming (for example Worlds Adrift). The company says it will double down on its ecosystem and technology to expand its developer base. Improbable has offices in London and San Francisco. CEO and co-founder Herman Narula framed the funding as timed to scale the company’s core solutions and ecosystem. The company previously had raised $50 million before this round and its post-money valuation is described by the CEO as around or over $1 billion. Improbable is a London-based company, founded at Cambridge University by Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead, that builds backend infrastructure to enable large-scale simulated worlds and virtual reality. Its platform creates an operating environment for real-time simulated spaces that can contain millions of entities and manage complex interactions. The technology handles server load and scale and simplifies development by allowing code to be written for a single machine and used with engines like Unity and Unreal. While immediate use cases include games and VR demonstrations, the company and investors highlight broader applications in biology, economics, defense, urban planning, transportation, and disease prevention. Improbable is working with a carefully selected group of studios to develop initial uses and has hired industry talent including Nick Button-Brown and Sam Kalnins. The company recently received a $20 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz.