W4 Games raises $15M to help push Godot Engine

W4 Games, the company set up by Godot Engine veterans Juan Linietsky, Rémi Verschelde and Fabio Alessandrelli, along with veteran entrepreneur Nicola Farronato just received a rather large sum of funding.

Announced in a blog post today it mentions they've raised $15M in "Series A funding" from a mixture of sources including "OSS Capital and Naval Ravikant (AngelList and AirChat co-founder). Other investors include Justin Hoffman (Ex Elastic), Larry Augustin (Ex SugarCRM), Alex Atallah (Co-founder of OpenSea), Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub), Diogo Mónica (Founder of Anchorage Digital), Scott Williamson (Ex GitLab) and more notable founders and executives in the commercial open-source ecosystem".

This is a pretty impressive sum to me, but this kind of money actually gets thrown around a lot. It's notable to us here at GamingOnLinux though since this money will go into pushing the free and open source Godot Engine.

What will they be using the funding for? W4 Games plan to more than double their staff over the next 18 months, and they will use all of it to "strengthen our role within the Godot ecosystem by supporting its open-source development and continuing to build products and services to facilitate Godot’s expansion, such as W4 Consoles (an approved middleware console porting solution for Godot games) and W4 Cloud (multi-tenant service to support millions of users)" along with expansion plans across North America, Europe, and Asia and a new Godot education program.

Naturally, these type of investments depend on W4 Games having a business plan for long-term profit, since the people and companies that invest will want a return on it. With W4 Games' work on getting Godot Engine supported fully on consoles (which they can't have in the main open source code due to the secrecy of console companies), and the increasing popularity of Godot — it should be interesting to see what happens.

What are your thoughts on this?