Funding package for Yorkshire gaming technology

Left to right: Ed French, Chief Executive of Tangentix Ltd with Finance Yorkshire’s Darren Morris and Ashwin Kumaraswamy

A leading provider of advanced compression & distribution technology for 3D video games has secured £1.4 million in funding to support its growth in the video games industry.

Tangentix Ltd, based at the Electric Works in Sheffield, is gaining global recognition for offering publishers, gamers and operators of digital distribution systems a more compact product to increase download speeds.

Finance Yorkshire provided a total of £750,000 from both its Equity Linked and Seedcorn Funds. Other investors in the round included RisingStars Growth Fund II and ParkWalk Advisors.

Tangentix, which currently employs ten staff, is now embarking on showcasing its new technology to the sector and debuted its latest innovations at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March.

Edward French, Chief Executive of Tangentix Ltd, said: “The funding marks a major milestone for Tangentix as we work to implement our compression technology in multiple AAA titles, and deploy a new concept for game discovery.

“We believe the growing size of games is a real challenge for publishers and gamers, and so we can now show the world what we’ve developed that addresses the problem, whilst also providing a great new way for gamers to discover new games.”

Tangentix started as a spin-out from the University of Bradford in 2009, based on new algorithms to represent 3D objects. Since then, the company has developed a suite of tools and patents to cover different aspects of compressing all of the main components of a video game, including the 3D meshes, textures, sounds and video. The result is that games are typically one third the size of the originals, whilst retaining the same high quality.

Darren Morris from Finance Yorkshire’s Equity Linked team added: “The global 3D video gaming market is huge and the technology Tangentix has developed represents a step change in downloading top quality 3D video games. The company is in a strong position to exploit the global demand to download games.”

Ashwin Kumaraswamy from Finance Yorkshire’s Seedcorn Fund said: “Tangentix will transform the experience of discovering, buying and delivery of video game content, improving the gamer’s experience, while reducing the publishers’ costs of distributing video games.”

“The funding from Finance Yorkshire’s Seedcorn and Equity Linked Funds is another example of how both can work together to provide the correct finance package a business requires to support its growth ambitions.”

Finance Yorkshire provides seedcorn, loan and equity linked investments, ranging from £15,000 to £2million, specifically to help small and medium sized businesses meet the gaps in the market for the funding they need for growth and development.

It is supported financially by the European Union. It has attracted £30million investment from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of Europe’s support for the region’s economic development through the Yorkshire and Humber ERDF Programme, £15million from Yorkshire Forward’s Single Programme, and £45million match funding from the European Investment Bank.

For more information please visit www.tangentix.com.

For more information about Finance Yorkshire, please visit www.finance-yorkshire.com or ring 0845 649 0000.

Note: this news article is from Finance Yorkshire’s previous fund. Read more about Finance Yorkshire