SoftBank-backed startup Improbable outlines plan for metaverse to rival Microsoft, Meta
Improbable CEO and co-founder Herman Narula.
Improbable/Viva Tech
Improbable, a SoftBank-backed startup developing huge virtual worlds, on Friday launched its plans for a network of metaverses that it hopes will one day be capable of hosting thousands of users and compete with platforms from U.S. tech giants such as Meta and Microsoft.
The British company, which was founded in 2012, released a white paper detailing its vision for MSquared, a “network of interoperable Web3 metaverses,” or 3D spaces in which people can live, work and interact with each other virtually. MSquared, which is a separate business entity from Improbable, raised $150 million from investors last year.
Google, Nvidia and Japanese cloud gaming firm Ubitus will serve as technical partners for the launch, Improbable said, providing the “cloud infrastructure, cloud pixel streaming, and video & audio technologies to enable unique, highly qualitative, easily accessible and seamless experiences in the metaverse.”
Behind MSquared is a complex feat of technical engineering with significant computing requirements. The service is intended to be accessible via cloud streaming, meaning you won’t have to download any software to jump into one of its worlds, similar to how movies and TV shows are accessed on Netflix.
What Improbable is launching isn’t a public release of its network of metaverses but rather the developer tools that will enable programmers to build their own metaverses. Developers began accessing its MML programming language as of Thursday evening, which enabled them to start creating objects in its digital worlds.
“The purpose of the metaverse is to enable new interactive entertainment experiences,” Herman Narula, Improbable’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC.
Narula cited the video games Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite as examples of metaverses that are already “incredibly successful.”
That’s because they’ve enabled people to take part in mass community and entertainment events, from parties to shared gaming experiences to live music concerts.
Entities will be able to build metaverse experiences using Improbable’s Morpheus technology, which is designed to host mass-scale multiplayer online games, Improbable said.
Improbable was previously able to host 4,500 players in a demonstration in partnership with blockchain firm Yuga Labs. The second time Improbable attempted this, it hosted a record-breaking 7,200 concurrent users.
What Improbable is building
Improbable said there will be four categories of participants that take part in MSquared: metaverse owners, content creators, service providers and users.
WATCH: SoftBank-backed startup Improbable launches MSquared metaverse
Metaverse owners are entities building a metaverse, content creators are the ones producing experiences or objects within a metaverse, service providers are the ones offering storage and computing power and users are those visiting metaverses and consuming content.
The idea is that, eventually, more than 10,000 people would be able to access MSquared. It will initially only be accessible via desktop, however Improbable said the plan is for this to be expanded to mobile devices and consoles by the end of the year.
Narula said MSquared is something that can live independently of Improbable — in other words, if Improbable were to cease to exist, MSquared would continue on uninterrupted.
“This really isn’t about Improbable,” he told CNBC. “We’re hyper involved in it” but over time will become less involved as other partners and developers come in, he said, adding this was necessary so that users, developers and brands “don’t feel locked into working with Improbable.”
“I’m OK with that,” Narula said. “It’s not just that I’m OK with it — it’s an essential facet of making this an economic reality.”
To make MSquared a success, though, the company will need brands to build experiences with its technology. The company hasn’t named any of those brands yet, but said it expects to announce its first partner, a major sports brand, as soon as next week.
Improbable will compete with the likes of Meta and Microsoft, which are building their own metaverses, as well as Roblox and Epic Games.
What is Improbable?
The London firm, one of Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank’s biggest bets in Britain, was founded by Cambridge computer science students Narula and Rob Whitehead with the ambition of developing large-scale computer simulations and “synthetic environments.”
Improbable’s original business plan was to apply its technology in gaming, and the company had partnerships with numerous studios including Bossa Studios to develop huge, constantly rendering mass multiplayer online games with its SpatialOS technology.
These games struggled to achieve scale, though, and Improbable wound down many of its gaming projects some years ago as a result.
The company later pivoted its focus toward deals with military and defense departments of governments in the U.K. and U.S. This venture similarly struggled, and Improbable recently sold off its defense portfolio.
The tech industry has been betting that virtual and augmented reality will prove to be something of a “paradigm” shift in technology akin to the invention of the internet or the smartphone.
Some are calling it the technology’s “iPhone moment,” in reference to effect Apple’s now ubiquitous handset had on consumers and businesses globally. Apple recently announced its first virtual and augmented reality headset, called the Vision Pro.
Improbable is taking a different route to companies like Meta, which has its Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds digital community software, and Microsoft, which is behind the HoloLens mixed reality products.
For one, you won’t need a headset to jump into an MSquared space, as the software will be desktop-based. And the experience will be a more “decentralized” one, Narula said, adding current metaverse platforms such as Meta and Microsoft’s are “walled gardens.”
‘European Union of the metaverse’
Improbable is aiming to make its metaverse a “decentralized” one in which users can exchange goods directly and across different platforms. The company has made a big bet on crypto and blockchain and supports digital assets like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which aim to let users prove ownership of virtual items.
Improbable will support numerous forms of payment and tokens, and may one day partner with a third-party project to bring in a digital token to support and enable the network. However, this token wouldn’t be created or issued by Improbable or M2, Improbable said.
The aim is for MSquared to incorporate interoperability, so users could transfer content and assets across different worlds and platforms — sort of like a “European Union of the metaverse,” Narula said.
That doesn’t mean it won’t have aspects of centralization, and Narula explained that some parts of its virtual universe would require centralized controls to prevent people from abusing its systems.
Civil rights campaigners and regulators have raised fears about the metaverse exacerbating some of the ills of the web. Improbable launched its own think tank devoted to discussing what the metaverse should look like and its social and ethical implications earlier this year.
WATCH: Crypto enthusiasts want to remake the internet with ‘Web3.’ Here’s what that means
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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