Game engine maker Unity is seeking to raise $125 million in Series E funding, a move that could reveal that its valuation as a company has doubled from $3 billion to $6 billion in a single stroke. Game developers and gamers alike are well-familiar with the engine and that's been reflected in the company's healthy growth. Now, the San Francisco-based company is seeking to grow even further with another injection of cash from investors.
TechCrunch reports that the game engine company filed to raise up to $125 million in funding in a Delaware stock authorization filing. The filing was subsequently confirmed by TechCrunch and acknowledged by an unnamed spokesman from Unity Technologies.
Like many financial terms, the terminology of "Series [Letter] funding" is simultaneously sensible and inconsistent. Typically, a company seeking investors will first begin with a Seed Round which raises the start-up money needed to get the company off of the ground. That's followed by the Angel Round where angel investors buy some of the first bits of stock. From there, it progresses to Series A funding, Series B funding, and so on; each of this subsequent rounds seek to raise additional money to continue growing a business that may not yet be in the black. (There are other terms like Series A' and Series AA, but you can read more about those at the above link if you're really interested.)
Unity had closed out their Series D funding round almost two years ago, raising $400 million and revealing the company's valuation was up to $2.6 billion. In the time since then, the technology company has opened up several new innovative avenues of revenue generation like a plugin that allows developers to connect a shop for physical items into their games.
More than half of all new games are built using the Unity engine; this is likely due to the sheer level of versatility afforded to game developers. Porting a game to multiple platforms is sometimes as easy as making a few minor changes and pushing a different button in the compiler. This strength has allowed many Unity games to become multiplatform releases, increasing the returns for both the developers and Unity itself when one considers the revenue share agreement in their license.
This newest round of funding is yet another step towards a rumored IPO from Unity Technologies; we may well be seeing the company on the stock market in 2020. It's too bad that someone else already has UNTY on the Dow Jones.
What do you think of Unity getting another round of funding? Do you think the company will go public or will they remain a private enterprise like Valve? What's the smarter move? Let us know in the comments below!
