Herman Narula shows just how much connections matter in Silicon Valley.
Narula, 26 years old, just raised $20 million from Menlo Park, Calif., firm Andreessen Horowitz for his London-based startup, Improbable.
The company is working on software that allows simulated worlds, such as those in videogames played by thousands or millions of people across the world at the same time, to stay up and running without interruptions that can occur if systems are overloaded.
A few weeks ago, Narula and his team flew to Silicon Valley, where they had meetings set up by some of their early investors, including Jaan Tallinn, a co-founder of Skype.
They quickly had had three investment offers. “One of the firms actually said, ‘You know, this is a good offer, but we’d understand if Marc Andreessen showed up and offered you $20 million or something,’” Narula said, referring to a general partner in the investment firm. “And a few days later, that’s exactly what happened.”
The deal was the latest example of American money pouring into London, amid a global rise in venture-capital investment. It is also at least the second Andreessen Horowitz investment in London this year. In January, the firm said it would invest in TransferWise, a currency transfer company.
One other connection of note: A TransferWise co-founder, Taavet Hinrikus, a former Skype employee, is also an angel investor in Improbable.
Narula met his co-founder Rob Whitehead during their last few weeks at the University of Cambridge. They spent several years building their product and hiring engineers away from places like Google, fueled by their own money and £1.5 million ($2.2 million) in so-called angel investment.
The problem they were trying to solve was highly technical: how to create a way for virtual entities—characters in a game, or cars in a simulation—to coexist and interact in a single virtual world without overloading the networks and servers. He described Improbable as being like an operating system on the cloud, where games run like apps.
The effect is that the virtual worlds running off of Improbable are always “on,” even when a player or user isn’t actively in an area. Narula said there have been times when game developers testing out the platform have forgotten that.
The technology could be used to simulate experiments, said investor Chris Dixon, an Andreessen Horowitz partner and new member of the Improbable board.
“Improbable is useful in any field that models complex systems—biology, economics, defense, urban planning, transportation, disease prevention, etc.,” Dixon wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Narula said the company went with Andreessen Horowitz over other offers in part because of the wealth of in-house services the firm offers startups, such as plans for marketing.