AGEIA completes successful round of funding

The creators of the world's first dedicated physics processing has announced a massively successful round of funding, which closed at USD 27 million.

The funding will be used by the company to bring its flagship product, the PhysX processor to market, targeting hard core gamers and developers of increasingly complex PC games.

The PhysX processor is a world first, and offloads physics processing from the main CPU and graphics processing units. Effectively, this enables developers to create much more intricate and detailed effects and animations, simulating the movement of hair, clothing, fluids and all other objects in the gaming world.

The company has already signed a number of deals with top-tier publishers and developers keen to take advantage of the PhysX processing power, including Ubisoft (Ghost Recon 3), Cryptic Studios (City of Villains) and Atari's Shiny Entertainment studio. The company expects the consumer add-in boards and systems equipped with the PhysX processor to be available by the end of 2005.

The round of financing, led by Granite Global Ventures, included current investors Apex Venture Partners, BA Venture Partners, CID Ventures, HIG Ventures, and VentureTech Alliance. Additional finance came from new investors Hercules Technology Growth Capital.

Manju Hegde, founder and CEO of AGEIA stated: "We strive to make physical interactions ubiquitous within games, therefore we must work closely with game developers to create compelling content. The continued support from our strategic capital partners allows us to do that today, while continuing to explore future PhysX technology implementations."

Support from the industry is growing continually, as developers seek new ways to improve on current generation games without the restrictions and limitations of existing hardware. Scott Bonham, managing director at Granite Global Ventures added: "Since AGEIA introduced the concept of hardware physics last March, we have seen an outpouring of support and enthusiasm from the gaming community. In a market driven by user experience, AGEIA is well positioned for continued growth, and weâre proud to have contributed to that success."

AEGIA's licensing deals include the recently announced partnership with Futuremark, who will use the PhysX chip for all future hardware performance benchmarks, testing the performance of the software physics engine on various hardware configurations in real-life game scenarios.