$12m funding boost for Emergent

Tools provider Emergent has secured as $12m investment off the back of strong sales for its middleware.

Emergent produces the Emergent Elements toolchain which includes the Gamebryo engine for next-gen games production.

The Round D funding was led by Jerusalem Venture Partners and Worldview Technology Partners with Adena Ventures, Walker Ventures, Copan, and Cisco Systems also participating.

“Emergent is driving strong sales growth around the world, and is intelligently growing its offerings to meet the needs of the game development industry,” said Gadi Tirosh, General Partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners. “Emergent delivers what game developers and publishers need most: scalable, modular development solutions that allow them to minimize their financial risk while unleashing their creativity to make great games.”

The cash will be invested in the Emergent operation as the company embarks on a corporate reorganisation.

This includes a consolidation of its research and development operations into a single location. To ‘increase collaboration between its development teams’, Emergent’s plans to expand its R&D Centre in Chapel Hill, NC, relocate most its Northern California staff to North Carolina – but also close its smaller Walnut Creek studio in California. The expanded R&D Centre will host Emergent’s Gamebryo, Metrics, Server, and Online Tools Development teams.

There have also been a raft of promotions and personnel changes including the promotion of exec VP Scott Johnson to president. Johnson will oversee the growth of the Emergent business.

“The games market is evolving quickly, with cross-platform production scalability and online migration becoming ever-increasing challenges to game creators,” said Geoffrey Selzer, CEO of Emergent.

 “Aided by our world class customer service and support Emergent is evolving to successfully solve these increasingly larger problems for developers and publishers. This recent round of funding and our organizational changes will enable us to continue to deliver the most progressive development solutions available to the games industry.”