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Herman Narula, co-founder and CEO at Improbable, speaks during a session at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

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Virtual reality startup Improbable said Wednesday that it reduced losses by 85% in 2022, a year that saw the company pivot its focus to powering new “metaverse” experiences.

The British company said in a press release that its revenues more than doubled last year to £78 million ($95 million), as its work on metaverses expanded significantly.

It recorded a loss of £19 million in the 2022 fiscal year, but this compared to a £131 million loss the year prior.

Improbable CEO Herman Narula said the company had reported its “best financial year” on record which reflected how its bet on the metaverse had paid off.

Improbable has historically burned through lots of money as it attempts to make its vision for vast virtual worlds a success. Critics have raised questions about the commercial sustainability of the business.

Improbable said that part of the reason behind the company’s reduction in losses was a dramatic reduction in the cost of running mass-scale virtual events.

Whereas initially it took millions of pounds to host one event, it now takes hundreds of thousands of pounds, the company said, and it anticipates this to continue to fall.

The year also saw Improbable divest two of its games studios, Inflexion Games and Midwinter Entertainment, and sell off a business unit focused on servicing defense clients.

Improbable finished the year with £140 million cash in the bank, signaling ongoing support from shareholders, the company said.

Improbable’s backers include the likes of SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz.

Full accounts for Improbable are yet to be released on Companies House, the U.K.’s official register of companies.

Metaverse pivot

In 2022, Improbable unveiled its ambition to become a major player in the so-called “metaverse” — the concept for a vast world, or worlds, in the digital sphere where people can work, buy and sell things, or just hang out.

The company has been working with players in the digital asset sphere, including Yuga Labs, which it worked with to build out the Otherside metaverse, where people can make their own digital avatars, attend events, and more.

The company doubled down on its metaverse strategy earlier this year with a white paper detailing its vision for MSquared, a “network of interoperable Web3 metaverses.”

MSquared, which is a separate business entity from Improbable, raised $150 million from investors last year.

The service — a complex piece of technical engineering with significant computing requirements — 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

It’s drawn interest from big names in sports and entertainment, like Major League Baseball (MLB).

The company struck a major deal with MLB to launch a new virtual ballpark based on Improbable’s metaverse technology. People in the MLB metaverse can choose any seat they’d like to watch a game, or pick a camera spot to focus on a particular player.

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, while Meta unveiled its Quest 3 headset in June. 

Improbable is taking a different route to companies like Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, which is behind the HoloLens mixed reality products.

For one, you won’t need a headset to enter an MSquared space, as the software will be desktop-based. The experience is also intended to be more decentralized and interoperable, with the ability to take content from one metaverse to another.

Founded in 2012, Improbable has for years been attempting to build vast, continuously rendering worlds in which thousands of people can play games and interact with each other.

The London-headquartered 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.”

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OpenAI’s Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

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OpenAI's Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

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OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.

Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.

Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.

“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.

Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.

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The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”

“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.

During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.

“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”

WATCH: Hollywood backlash grows against OpenAI’s new Sora video model

Hollywood backlash grows against OpenAI's new Sora video model

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.

The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.

The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.

“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.

In August, the U.S. government took a 10% stake in the company in an effort to beef up U.S. manufacturing capabilities. Intel has also received investments from SoftBank and AI chipmaking giant Nvidia.

Since taking the helm of Intel in March, Tan has faced massive pressure to deliver.

This summer, President Donald Trump called Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and demanded his resignation, but later changed his tone.

Intel shares have bounced 87% this year.

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Intel year-to-date stock chart.

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AI worries have climbed but demand is off the charts, says Bernstein's Rasgon

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.

Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images

Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.

Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.

Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.

Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.

The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.

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“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.

Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.

Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.

Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.

“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”

WATCH: Box CEO on AI monetization: Agents offer new monetization for existing software companies

Box CEO on AI monetization: Agents offer new monetization for existing software companies

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