Epic Games and Tencent invest $30 million in Hadean

Hadean, a U.K.-based distributed, spatial computing startup that’s setting out to build the infrastructure for the burgeoning metaverse, has closed a $30 million Series A round of funding from a high-profile cast of investors, including Epic Games and Tencent.
Founded out of London in 2015, Hadean started with a broad mission to put “supercomputer levels of processing power at the disposal of anyone,” TechCrunch wrote back in 2017 when the company was still operating in beta. In the intervening years, Hadean has iterated for different use cases and has emerged as a major player in the gaming sphere in particular, where it powers major hits such as Minecraft.
At its core, Hadean is all about helping developers scale their codebase to support software that requires significant computing power, something that Minecraft demands particularly when it involves multiplayer engagement across the internet. Hadean’s spatial simulation library integrates with all the major gaming engines, and helps MMO (massively multiplayer online game) and other online game developers avoid having to put player limits in place, or use other forms of technical (but limited) trickery to circumvent the problems created by hundreds or more gamers participating at the same time. It’s all about keeping the dreaded “lag” at bay, while maintaining the depth, complexity and realism of a single-player offline console game.
This is achieved through the magic of distributed computing, with Hadean’s platform eliminating “excessive middleware, orchestration, and overengineering,” as the company puts it, dynamically provisioning more or fewer resources as a game requires.
But the underlying technology can be used for just about any use case, from resource-intensive enterprise applications through to web3, blockchain and the metaverse. Back in July, Hadean was awarded a contract with the British Army to build a simulated training environment for land warfare.