Unity Technologies raises $5.5 million

With a multiplatform game development tool, Unity is growing in every direction

Long, long gone are the days of one console or handheld dominating the gaming market. These days, developers need to extend their reach to however many of the multifarious venues they can.

Unity Technologies, which provides a software solution for creating 3D environments for PC, Mac, Wii, and iPhone games, just raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital to continue its drive towards a simple and elegant application for cross-platform game design.

Founded in 2004, Unity has already evolved quite a bit, having just released version 2.5 of its fully integrated professional studio software. Unity's editor claims to have every aspect of gaming graphics design covered: shaders, terrains, physics, shadows, and lighting. Further, developers can integrate sound directly into their 3D games, as well as modify the games to be either single-player, multi-player, or both.

Best of all, Unity supports deployment to many platforms, be it operating system (Mac and Windows), Web browser (Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox), gaming console (Nintendo Wii), or mobile operating system (iPhone).
iPhone development, in particular, has come to favor Unity considerably. Over 250 games on the App Store take advantage of Unity's tool and, less than a month ago, Unity was gloating that 5 games in the top 100 were powered by its system. The games--Battle Bears, Zombieville USA, Castle Warriors, Samurai: Way of the Warrior, and Monster Trucks Nitro--exhibit just how much and how many different things the developer can do with Unity's graphics toolbox. Unity says iPhone game developers see up to a 3x performance boost when they develop their games through Unity's platform.

Big name game brands like Nickelodeon and Electronic Arts have already picked up Unity's system, but this latest raising of capital can only signal more growth for Unity in the future.