Herman Narula, co-founder and CEO at Improbable, delivers an inspiring speech at the Web Summit in Lisbon.
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Improbable, a virtual reality startup, has announced an impressive 85% reduction in losses in 2022, a year that saw the company shift its focus to powering innovative “metaverse” experiences.
The British company revealed that its revenues surpassed £78 million ($95 million) last year, more than doubling from the previous year, as it expanded its work on metaverses.
The company successfully reduced its losses in the 2022 fiscal year from £131 million to £19 million.
Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, expressed his satisfaction with the company’s financial performance, stating that their bet on the metaverse had paid off.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Narula explained that Improbable has been able to increase its productivity by leveraging generative artificial intelligence, allowing their coders to write code and find solutions more efficiently.
“We believe that smaller companies may be the optimal size for success in the tech industry in 2023,” Narula remarked. He attributed this to the benefits of remote work, which has made it challenging to motivate teams that feel disconnected from management.
“In this evolving landscape, we are moving towards smaller, agile entities instead of large tech behemoths,” he added.
Narula expressed hope for the success of companies like Improbable, as they do not have to follow the same path as big tech giants like Microsoft and Meta, which rely on massive workforces for growth.
Improbable has historically faced financial challenges in its pursuit of creating vast virtual worlds. However, the company claims that significant cost reductions in running mass-scale virtual events have contributed to their reduction in losses.
The company shared that hosting an event previously required millions of pounds, but now costs only hundreds of thousands, with expectations of further reductions in the future.
In addition, Improbable divested two of its game studios, Inflexion Games and Midwinter Entertainment, and sold off a business unit focused on servicing defense clients during the year.
The company ended 2022 with £140 million in cash, indicating ongoing support from its shareholders, which include SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, and Temasek.
Full financial accounts for Improbable have yet to be released by Companies House, the official register of companies in the UK.
Metaverse pivot
In 2022, Improbable unveiled its ambitious plan to establish itself as a major player in the emerging “metaverse” concept, a digital realm where people can work, trade, socialize, and more.
The company collaborated with Yuga Labs to develop the Otherside metaverse, allowing individuals to create their own digital avatars and participate in various events.
Improbable further solidified its metaverse strategy with the release of a white paper outlining its vision for MSquared, a network of interconnected and interoperable Web3 metaverses.
MSquared, a separate entity from Improbable, raised $150 million in funding last year.
The service aims to be easily accessible through cloud streaming, eliminating the need for software downloads, similar to how movies and TV shows are accessed on Netflix.
Major League Baseball (MLB) has expressed interest in Improbable’s metaverse technology and partnered with the company to launch a virtual ballpark. Users in the MLB metaverse can choose their preferred seats or focus on specific players through different camera angles.
The technology industry believes that virtual and augmented reality will bring about a transformative shift similar to the internet or smartphones. Some refer to this phenomenon as the technology’s “iPhone moment,” drawing parallels to the wide-scale impact of Apple’s iconic smartphone.
In recent developments, Apple introduced its first virtual and augmented reality headset, the Vision Pro, and Meta unveiled its Quest 3 headset in June.
Improbable distinguishes itself from companies like Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, which are focused on devices such as the HoloLens mixed reality products. Improbable’s MSquared space is desktop-based and aims to be decentralized and interoperable, allowing content to be transferred across different metaverses.
Founded in 2012, Improbable has been dedicated to building vast and immersive computer simulations and synthetic environments where thousands of people can interact and enjoy games.
The London-based company, one of SoftBank’s significant investments in the UK, was founded by Cambridge computer science students Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead.
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