Andreessen Horowitz finds an Improbable way to fund startup startup Improbable
SILICON Valley group Andreessen Horowitz has just ploughed $20m (£13.4m) into London-based virtual worlds creator Improbable.
Entrepreneur Chris Dixon, who is a partner of Andreessen Horowitz and is behind its investment in tech firm Oculus VR before it was bought out by Facebook for $2bn, will join Improbable’s board along with colleague Marc Andreessen. The investment could value the firm at $100m.
Dixon revealed the investment in a blog post yesterday, explaining why he is backing the company, which was founded by a group of computer scientists from the University of Cambridge: “Improbable’s technology solves the parallelisation problem for an important class of problems: anything that can be defined as a set of entities that interact in space.”
Improbable and Dixon both believe virtual reality can be used to solve problems in areas as diverse as defence, healthcare and economics, as well as entertainment. Dixon noted that while the “initial application for the Improbable technology was gaming, it could be used in any field that models complex systems”.