Metaverse infrastructure and developer startup Hadean today announced that it has raised $30 million in new funding to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds.

The Series A round was led by Molten Ventures, with participation from 2050 Capital, Alumni Ventures, Aster Capital, Entrepreneur First and InQTel. Epic Games, the creator of the massively popular video game “Fortnite” and developer of gaming graphics software kit Unreal Engine also participated in the round.

The company was founded in 2015 with the mission of providing a scalable, distributed computing platform for Web3 and the metaverse. It is currently used to power immersive virtual worlds in video games and industrial applications for real-world simulation.

“Today’s virtual worlds are a limited experience — small scale, siloed and insecure. Hence why these are the technical challenges we’re tackling today,” said Craig Beddis, Hadean’s co-founder and chief executive. “But we believe the true success and mass adoption of the metaverse will rely on the ease by which creators will be able to build their own experiences at scale, leveraging open and robust metaverse-as-a-service technologies.”

The metaverse is described as interconnected virtual worlds where people will live out their digital lives, work, play, shop and socialize. It will require powerful hardware and robust software to allow large numbers of concurrent users to interact with one another in virtual spaces without slowing the experience down while also maintaining high fidelity.

Using Hadean’s technology, thousands of users can enter into an immersive virtual space at the same time and experience the same world with minimal latency. Using Hadean’s infrastructure, the video game maker CCP Games unveiled a demo that permitted 14,000 players to use Unreal Engine to participate in a single online world at once.

“Hadean’s computing power will provide the infrastructure that’s needed as we work to create a scalable metaverse,” said Marc Petit, vice president of Epic’s Unreal Engine ecosystem. “The company’s technology complements Epic’s Unreal Engine by enabling massive amounts of concurrent users and unlocking new tools for creators and developers.”

According to a report from MarketsandMarkets, the metaverse market will hit an estimated $426 billion by 2027, up from $61.8 billion in 2022. The major factors driving this will be an increasing demand from media and entertainment as well as gaming, especially virtual reality and augmented reality, which allows users to immerse themselves in virtual worlds.

As the demand for metaverse technologies continues to grow, Hadean believes that this funding will allow it to maintain the best infrastructure needed to support its future and the developers who will build it. The company has already inked multi-year deals in entertainment and gaming for metaverse components with companies including the music metaverse Pixelynx, “play to own” metaverse GamesCoin, gaming giant Sony and the block-based sandbox video game “Minecraft.”

“Hadean’s mission is to bridge physical and virtual worlds — to help us make better decisions and ultimately improve the quality of our lives in the physical world,” said Beddis.

Image: Nepool