China game engine developer Cocos raises $50m

The new funding will fuel the growth of its open-source Cocos Creator game engine. The goal is to expand usage beyond games to industries such as automotive, education, home design, and architectural engineering.

SAIF Partners China invested tens of millions of RMB in a pre-Series A round in 2017. This was followed by a Series A of undisclosed size in 2018 led by Greenwoods Investment, with participation from Yisu Capital. SAIF re-upped in the round. Post the transaction, Cocos was valued at USD 120m, according to AVCJ Research.

Founded in 2010, the Beijing-based company has been a popular open-source engine for making 2D games. Last year, it added a 3D engine and integrated it with the existing 2D platform.

Cocos is one of the three major cross-platform game engines in the world alongside Unreal and Unity. It claims a 40% market share of China’s mobile game market and 30% globally. Tencent Holdings, NetEase, Nintendo, Ubisoft have all used the Cocos engine to develop and launch their own games.

Cocos has been used by more than 1.5m developers to date, and claims over 300,000 monthly active developers. More than 1.6bn people play games that rely on the engine.

The company has already expanded into areas such as human-device interaction for smart cockpits in new-generation cars. It has also launched a courseware editor for online education and is currently working on tools for metaverse creation.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• China
• gaming
• GGV Capital
• CCB
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