DC Thomson Ventures in PlayCanvas fundraising round

Published

20th November 2014

Cloud-hosted games development firm PlayCanvas has secured £300,000 in new investment following a seed funding round led by DC Thomson Ventures.

The company, the venture capital arm of Dundee-based media group and The Courier publisher DC Thomson & Co Ltd, said the new investment came as the PlayCanvas platform signed up its 20,000th developer.

The firm is a leading WebGL (web graphics library) game engine and tools provider, and its software has been designed to change the way video games are built, shared and played.

The multi-award winning cloud-hosted platform is used by developers, artists and designers to create 3D games and content that work plugin-free on every device.

The company — which for the last seven months has been based at IDEALondon, the start-up incubator founded by DC Thomson in conjunction with Cisco and University College London — is working with clients including Activision, ARM and Mozilla.

“I am delighted to welcome DC Thomson Ventures on board as a PlayCanvas investor,” said CEO Will Eastcott, who co-founded the firm with chief technical officer Dave Evans.

“Having invited us into IDEALondon, a state-of-the-art innovation centre, DC Thomson Ventures has been with us every step of the way.

“In the past six months we’ve grown our team from four to 10, launched our payment plans and quadrupled our user base. Through all of this, DC Thomson’s support and advice has been absolutely invaluable.”

DC Thomson Ventures principal Nick Verkroost said: “Will and Dave are two highly accomplished founders bringing a wealth of experience from their time in the games industry.

“They have a clear vision of what the developer community needs as the industry fragments into smaller, nimbler teams, and we’re delighted to be joining them on the journey.”

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