W4 Games raises $15M to drive video game development inflection with Godot Engine

December 07, 2023 at 12:21 PM EST

OSS Capital leads the Series A funding alongside Naval Ravikant (Founder of AngelList) and a group of angels including Justin Hoffmann, Larry Augustin, Alex Atallah, Thomas Dohmke, Diogo Monica, Scott Williamson.

Dublin, Ireland Dec 7, 2023 (Issuewire.com) - 3 billion people play video games - that's nearly half the planet! Despite this already massive market size, the video game industry is at an inflection point where its already strong growth rate will increase even further, and exponentially so. Shifting demographics, widening Internet access, emerging technologies, and ever-growing adoption by non-gaming industries will completely transform demand for video game developers, platforms, and games themselves. 25,000+ studios. 22 million+ gaming jobs. These illustrate just the tip of the iceberg.

We at W4 Games are going all-in on the creation of an ecosystem with the Godot Engine at its center. 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.

To help drive our continuing growth, we are thrilled to announce a new $15M Series A funding round led by OSS Capital and Naval Ravikant (AngelList and AirChat co-founder). Other investors include Justin Hoffmann (Ex Elastic), Larry Augustin (Ex SugarCRM), Alex Atallah (Co-founder of OpenSea), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub), Diogo Monica (Founder of Anchorage Digital), Scott Williamson (Ex GitLab) and more notable founders and executives in the commercial open-source ecosystem.

W4 Games will strengthen our role within the Godot ecosystem by supporting its open-source development and continuing to build products and services to facilitate Godot's expansion, such as W4 Consoles (an approved middleware console porting solution for Godot games) and W4 Cloud (multi-tenant service to support millions of users). Moreover, we will target international expansion across North America, Europe, and Asia, and the development of a new Godot education program.

With this new funding, W4 Games aims to more than double its headcount in the coming 18 months to capture the fast-growing demand for its products and services.

"W4 and the Godot community mark the first time in history that the now $300B+ gaming industry is seeing fundamental disruption and acceleration of innovation thanks to open source. OSS Capital is proud to deepen our partnership with W4 towards an open future in gaming."

Joseph Jacks (Founder and General Partner at OSS Capital)

About W4 Games (w4games.com)

Founded in 2021, W4 Games is an Irish startup formed by Godot veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli, and veteran entrepreneur Nicola Farronato. The company plans to revolutionize the game industry by bringing the Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) business model to an ecosystem that has traditionally relied on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of independent vendors. By providing a commercial services offering anchored in the entirely open and community-developed Godot platform, W4 Games believes that companies will be able to reclaim control of the technology powering their games, with a level of freedom and flexibility they never had before. In 2021 W4 Games raised its seed investment round led by OSS and Lux Capital, with the participation of SISU Ventures and Bob Young, the co-founder of Red Hat.