As the gaming industry continues to rapidly expand, there are several trends that make it increasingly difficult to build games. The tools to support platform features are nascent and the competition for platform engineers is at an all-time high. Player expectations—such as the ability to play anywhere with friends, or an ever-increasing appetite for frequent, high-quality content updates—have also contributed to an increase in development complexity.
We set out with the ambitious mission to build the world’s most scalable and extensible backend for games, allowing studios to focus on the creation of the game. I’m excited to share updates on the progress that we’ve made around our team, the product, and new partners.
We’re excited to welcome new investors
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Pragma has raised a $22 million Series B funding round led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation from our existing investors Greylock Partners, Upfront Ventures, and Advancit Capital, and new investors Daher Capital, Overwolf, Kevin Lin (Twitch), and Ted Gill (Unknown Worlds). Nikhil Sachdev, Managing Director at Insight Partners, has joined Pragma’s board. We’re fortunate to have some of the best minds in gaming, enterprise, and venture capital support us, and this capital will allow us to accelerate hiring and expand our product to more studios.
“Pragma’s industry-leading software platform provides gaming studios of all types with the backend infrastructure to build multiplayer live services games. Pragma is quickly emerging as a leading infrastructure platform in the Games-as-a-Service industry, which we expect to grow as games become more immersive, networked and engaging. Insight couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Eden and Chris and their brilliant team in this exciting next chapter for Pragma.”
-Nikhil Sachdev, Managing Director at Insight Partners
What we’ve been building at Pragma
We’ve rapidly expanded our feature set to include all of the core features needed to ship a live service game. This includes content management and player data with versioning and migration features, full game loop services like lobby, invites, game modes, matchmaking, and game server management, as well as our cross-platform accounts system that is integrated with the major platforms. We’re finalizing our data pipelines for metrics and telemetry, as well as built-in instrumentation for live ops, observability, and related elements.
Our upcoming release is designed to support more than one million concurrent players, built by our team who has helped scale the largest games in the world. It includes a built-in web portal with CMS and other management features, a fully functioning demo game shipped along with the product that serves as a canonical example of integration patterns, plugins, and custom services. Our upcoming roadmap will build on this strong foundation. This includes rich social features such as cross-platform social, friends, guilds, and factions. Innovating in this area will help us work towards our mission of enabling healthy online communities.
We’re partnering with the world’s best studios
We’re also thrilled to announce more world-class studios that we’ll be powering including Frost Giant Studios and Lightforge Games.
"By leveraging Pragma's platform, Frost Giant is free to focus on building a great game, while still providing players top notch network features and performance." - Tim Morten, CEO at Frost Giant Studios
“Using Pragma derisks our game and allows us to focus on what we're best at. They've assembled an amazing team of platform engineers who have built an online engine that gives us the extensibility and scalability we need while keeping integration simple.” -Matt Schembari, CEO at Lightforge Games
We’re lucky to be attracting and building a world-class team
In order to achieve our mission of supporting healthy and vibrant online communities, we must create a healthy and vibrant workplace. We’ve written a bit more about our culture on our blog and in an interview with Games Industry. This has allowed us to attract unique and accomplished individuals in gaming and enterprise software.
Ngozi Watts was an early employee at Unity and was key in helping Unity commercialize and scale. Because of his passion for his customers, he left Unity while it was rapidly expanding to start a company that solved his customers’ needs. After this, he worked at Google and most recently as global BD lead for Game Tech at AWS. Ngozi is someone who cares deeply about product quality and customer-centricity and we're elated to have him lead Business Development for Pragma.
Chana Zolty worked at Riot Games for more than 4 years as a senior technical editor who ran Riot’s Tech Blog. She cares deeply about showing, not just telling--which is demonstrated by her top-notch execution on documentation and content. With her unique background in tech writing and engineering, we’re thrilled to have her lead our effort towards delivering an outstanding onboarding experience for our customers.
Kyle Partridge was an early engineer at SendGrid where he helped scale the system to billions of emails a day on the mail pipeline team. He was also key in building out the build systems, docker images, and functional dev environments. Most recently he was leading an engineering team at Riot Games. Kyle joins Pragma to support scaling our engine as our client base expands and ultimately supports millions of concurrent users.
What’s next
It’s hard to believe all that has happened in the last two years since we started. Notably, a global pandemic drove us into isolation, with many seeking refuge and solace in games. As people grapple with the impacts of quarantine and the pandemic, the gaming industry has faced a reckoning for toxic and inequitable workplaces that failed to prioritize the health and happiness of employees.
We believe that the games are a place where people should experience strong community and connection. We’ve just scratched the surface on supporting this goal—features that not only unlock game studios but enable them to create healthy and vibrant communities.
As we prepare for our next growth phase, we are opening up new positions as we expand our product and services. If you’re interested in what we’re working on, please see our open roles at pragma.gg/careers. We’re a remote company with team members currently in 7 cities and 3 countries.
