Coming off a packed week at GDC, I’m excited to announce our latest $7.6M Seed lead in Hathora, a NY startup that provides seamless scaling for multiplayer games. At Upfront Ventures, we believe that gaming is the future of entertainment ($321B in revenue by 2026), with social, multiplayer experiences at the core of that growth (83% of all US gamers playing together online). However, managing and scaling server infrastructure for online multiplayer games has been a significant challenge to date, with even the biggest AAA games having launch and scaling failovers (case in point, I had to wait quite a while to play the Diablo IV open beta this weekend, and this was after a closed beta the previous weekend with similar delays).

Hathora aims to remove this barrier with its cost-effective and fully managed serverless hosting platform. Serverless cloud computing offers several benefits for online multiplayer games including the ability for developers to dynamically scale and eliminate the need for pre-provisioning of servers. Their serverless hosting platform is global, processing is in-memory, and scaling is designed for statefulness, addressing the unique infrastructural requirements of the industry. This means that game developers can quickly and easily adjust server capacity to meet fluctuating player demand, ensuring that latency remains low and gameplay remains smooth. Instead of burdening a DevOps team with setting up and maintaining their own AWS EC2 instances, just send Hathora your game container and they’ll handle it all.

When I first met Sid and Harsh in the summer of 2022, I knew they were uniquely suited to tackling this challenge. Both have deep cloud and infrastructure experience. They met as CS undergrads at Carnegie Melon, then went on to work on large enterprise projects at Palantir, including transitioning them from on-premise severs to the cloud. During the pandemic, Sid moved to Databricks, where he helped build an orchestration layer that managed running across AWS, GCP and Azure. On the other hand, Harsh started working on a side project with friends to create an online version of a board game they played frequently. What he thought would be a weekend project turned into months of development as he quickly ran into many of the problems that Hathora is solving today. Realizing that many other game developers were facing the same issues he was, Harsh decided to start Hathora and reached out to Sid to partner together.

I’ve had countless conversations with game developers around the lack of modern, standardized tools. Most resort to managing their own infrastructure, while a small minority use older services like Multiplay. Hathora's platform works seamlessly with Unity and Unreal games, and integrates with popular backend services like Pragma and PlayFab. While diligencing Hathora, we introduced them to Frost Giant Studios (team behind StarCraft II building a next generation real-time strategy game), who were immediately impressed with the platform and signed as a customer weeks later. This is particularly special for me as a former Starcraft fan, as well given Hathora is supporting Frost Giant alongside fellow portfolio company Pragma.

Thank you Sid and Harsh for partnering with us on this journey and inviting me to the board. As well, thrilled to be alongside Founders Fund, Lunar Ventures, Mantis Capital, and an amazing group of angels (Eden Chen of Pragma, Seth Sivak of Proletariat / Blizzard, Brandi House of Probably Monsters / Unity, Nate Mitchell of MountainTop Studios / Oculus, Mike Atamas of Omni Creator Products and Akin Babayigit of Tripledot Studios). If you’re a gaming studio that’s building innovative multiplayer games, be sure to check out Hathora and learn about how the platform can supercharge your developer and player experiences. And last but not least, the team is hiring!