Tangentix targets growth with £1.4m funding deal

A COMPANY that provides advanced compression and distribution technology for 3D video games has secured £1.4m to support its growth in the video games industry.

Tangentix, 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 employs 10 staff, is now showcasing its new technology to the sector and debuted its latest innovations at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March.

Chief executive Edward French 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 of Finance Yorkshire, said: “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.”