Metaverse company Improbable has sold one of its key gaming ventures to London-listed video game developer Keywords Studios for £76.5 million ($97.1 million).
The company closed the deal to sell The Multiplayer Group (MPG), a multiplayer game services firm, to Keywords on Sunday, an Improbable spokesperson told CNBC.
Based in Ireland, Keywords owns more than 70 studios in locations including Los Angeles, France, Brazil, Mexico and Spain. The firm mainly develops games for third-party developers.
Keywords’ shares have fallen around 49% year-to-date. It has been on an acquisition spree lately, earmarking 91.9 million euros ($100 million) to new takeovers.
That led to a shift from a net cash position at the end of last year to a net debt position of €11.4 million as of June 30.
Keywords also reported earnings per share of 18.48 euro cents in its half-year results for the period to June 30, down 40% year over year.
Keywords said its acquisition of MPG was funded primarily through cash and its existing revolving credit facility, and would contribute double-digit revenue growth in 2024.
Keywords expects the transaction to be earnings per share accretive in its first full year post-acquisition.
MPG was founded in 2018 and is known for behind-the-scenes work on games such as Fallout 76 and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.
Herman Narula, Improbable’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC the transaction was part of its “venture builder” strategy, through which it invests in or acquires gaming and metaverse-related teams with the option of expanding or spinning them off at a later point.
“The thought was, if we understand multiplayer well, and we understand metaverses, maybe we can spot opportunities where we can bring things in the den that we can do well with. And then, at the right time, if it makes sense, to either keep growing them or potentially spin them out,” Narula told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
“It became clear that working with MPG and bringing them in house would have let us learn a colossal amount and help them grow.”
Improbable acquired MPG in 2019, and it has grown dramatically since. Employee numbers rose sixfold in the past four years to 360.
And MPG’s valuation has more than doubled to £76.5 million from Improbable’s original purchase price of £30 million.
While the move suggests a potential scaling back of Improbable’s gaming-related investments, Narula disputed the idea that a sale of MPG marks any sort of retrenchment from that space.
“We’re not in any way selling any technology, or in any way ceasing to operate with games companies,” Narula said. “MPG provide a very specific, specialised service.”
A series of games built on Improbable’s original SpatialOS technology have been canceled in recent years.
They include the open-world game Nostos, developed by NetEase, Worlds Adrift, made by Bossa Studios, and the console version of Scavengers, a game developed by Midwinter Entertainment.
Midwinter was sold by Improbable earlier this year to Behaviour Interactive.
Morpheus, a technology platform developed by Improbable, is now the company’s primary product. Morpheus is designed to host mass-scale multiplayer online games.
Improbable has hosted new experiences using its Morpheus tech, including virtual Major League Baseball games, and the “Otherside” metaverse developed in partnership with blockchain firm Yuga Labs.
Trying to sell investors on ‘metaverse’
Founded in 2012, Improbable is a British firm that aims to build what it calls a network of metaverses. In June, Improbable launched MSquared, a metaverse creation suite, and granted developers access to the platform.
MSquared includes its own network, tech stack, and open-source metaverse markup language.
The deal to sell MPG, one of Improbable’s many notable bets on gaming, arrives after a series of struggles at the firm.
Improbable has undergone substantial cost reductions.
The firm, which scored a $3.4 billion valuation in October 2022, laid off dozens of staffers late last year after raising substantial sums from SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz.
But valuations of once buzzy metaverse and Web3-related startups have been knocked this year and last year by waning investor enthusiasm for the space.
Improbable has more recently touted itself as artificial intelligence-enabled, saying this has helped lower costs. The company slashed its losses by 85% in 2022 to £19 million.
‘Tale of two metaverses’
Improbable originally set out to build large-scale computer simulations that have applications in gaming and defense.
But its metaverse bets have now become its main focus.
Improbable sold its defense business to Noia Capital in September, marking an exit from a loss-making venture for the firm.
Narula says he expects to see a “tale of two metaverses” emerge next year. Centralized gaming experiences such as Roblox and Fortnite will be eschewed in favor of decentralized, “Web3” metaverses, Narula said.
Web3 refers to the idea of a more decentralized and open version of the web, outside the control of a handful of powerful tech companies like Amazon and Meta.
Blockchain is a key technology involved.
“Ultimately, they [Roblox and Fortnite] are games with different modes made by users and by brands. But people can’t build businesses that they have control over, or that can do commercial things that would be appropriate,” Narula said.
“The other branch of the metaverse, which is driven in some ways by Web3 and in other ways by companies like ours … is really about creating a network of sovereign metaverses.”
Analysts have expressed skepticism about the ability for Improbable to commercialize its technology, not least owing to the technical limitations and high costs involved.
“The jury is still out if they have a viable business model going forward, or whether the reality will ever match the ‘virtual’ hype,” Greg Martin, co-founder and managing director of Rainmaker Securities, a private market trading firm, told CNBC.
Narula said he is hoping to sign up many more partners for MSquared in the future.
Improbable, which is focusing on putting on large-scale metaverse events, ran 30 such gatherings in 2023, up from only three last year. The company plans to raise that number to 300 in 2024.
Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.
“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
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Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.
During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.
In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.
Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.
The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.
Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.
Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.
In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Tuesday that the Trump administration does not want to “harm Apple” with tariffs.
“Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs,” Hassett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.”
Hassett’s comments come after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the U.S. Apple has historically manufactured its products in foreign countries including China, India and Vietnam.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in the post. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”
By some estimates, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost as much as $3,500.
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“If you think that Apple has a factory some place that’s got a set number of iPhones that it produces and it needs to sell them no matter what, then Apple will bear those tariffs, not consumers, because it’s an elastic supply,” Hassett said.
Hasset’s comments continue the administration’s push to pressure companies to shoulder the cost burden of Trump’s tariffs, instead of raising prices for consumers.
Earlier this month, Trump told retail giant Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS” after the company warned it would have to pass those added costs on.
Shares of Apple were up more than 1% Tuesday.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.
Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.
The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads.
The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care.
Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.
“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview.“What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”
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Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.
“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”
Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report.
Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care.
To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were.
Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline.
“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said.
Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching.
The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.
“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.