Tangentix to play major role in games sector thanks to funding

The Sheffield-based business has been backed by investors Finance Yorkshire, RisingStars Growth Fund II and ParkWalk Advisers. Finance Yorkshire provided a total of £750,000 from both its equity linked and seedcorn funds.

Tangentix provides advanced compression and distribution technology for 3D video games. It serves publishers, gamers and operators of digital distribution systems.

The company 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. Tangentix says that the result is that games are “typically one third the size of the originals, whilst retaining the same high quality”.

Edward French, CEO of Tangentix, said that the funding marks “a major milestone for Tangentix”. He added: “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, which currently employs ten staff and is at pre-revenue stage, debuted its latest innovations at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March.

Darren Morris, from Finance Yorkshire’s equity linked team, added: “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.”

Ashwin Kumaraswamy, from Finance Yorkshire’s seedcorn fund, said: “Tangentix will transform the experience of discovering, buying and delivery of video game content, improving the gamer’s experience, while reducing the publishers’ costs of distributing video games.”