Improbable expands to US with new San Francisco office

London-based start-up Improbable has revealed that it will soon open its first US office, expanding the resources behind its biggest project SpatialOS.

The new branch will open doors next month and will be based in downtown San Francisco. Improbable is now hiring to fill this second branch, with plans for the staff in both California and London to spend time at their sister office.

The firm says it has targeted San Francisco for the local talent and expertise, which will help build on what the firm has started with SpatialOS, a computational platform that helps games developers build persistent worlds on a larger scale. It will also establish partnerships with North American developers.

Improbable's ambition is to create an even larger platform and ecosystem that lets users build "massive, real-time simulations" such as city-scale models.

In a statement the firm said: "We thought hard before making this decision, and we aren't taking it lightly. Companies often fail when they build offices away from HQ - and the best people want to be close to the action. We want our two offices to work together as a single, geographically distant but closely connected headquarters - not as a core office and a satellite.

"We are planning to run London and San Francisco as a unified operation. Our senior team will be moving between sites, but so will the rest of our teams - we'll be giving team members extensive chances to travel and spend extended time across offices. To make this work we are working on processes which can give our teams a great deal of autonomy and trust."

Improbable's London HQ was fairly quiet for its first few years of operation, hiring experienced games talent from several of the UK's most renowned studios. It has since started making noise about the possibilities afforded by SpatialOS, as demonstrated by Bossa Studio's Worlds Adrift, and has released a beta version of the tech to developers as part of a partnership with Google.