Cocos raises $50M to fuel open source game engine growth

Cocos Technology said it has raised $50 million to fuel the growth of its open source Cocos Creator game engine.

Cocos has been around for a long time as a foundation for making 2D games for mobile devices and other platforms. Last year, it also added its first all-in-one 3D engine and editor with a new version of the Cocos game engine, which traces its roots back a decade to Cocos2d-x.

Cocos has been used by more than 1.4 million developers to date, and over 100,000 games in the app stores use it. And more than 1.6 billion people play games that use the engine.

The investors include CCB Trust, GGV Capital, Agora, and others. With this round of funding, Cocos will continue to improve the core technology of the engine with the help of capital and promote the further integration of the engine within various industries such as games, automobiles, education, XR, home design, architectural engineering design, and other future endeavors.

Cocos said it is committed to providing developers with more convenient creation tools, reliable technical solutions,
and diversified products and services for cross-industry customers.

Founded in 2010, Beijing-based Cocos has created a global digital interactive content development platform. The
Cocos engine is a popular open-source engine in the world. Cocos has cultivated the underlying technology for many years, providing the most professional products and services. 

The company bills Cocos Creator is an efficient and easy-to-use cross-platform interactive digital content development engine built by Cocos. It is not only a powerful game development tool but also an open-source engine that can meet the creative needs of many developers and engineers.

In May 2021, Cocos Creator 3.1 was officially released. Cocos and Huawei’s HiSilicon team cooperated on the underlying facilities of the engine, becoming the first case of the “chip + engine” cooperation model in China. This version includes the deferred rendering pipeline contributed by the Huawei HiSilicon GPU team and the support of the PhysX physical backend.

The Cocos engine covers all market categories and is widely used and recognized worldwide. China’s mobile game market share accounts for 40%, and the global mobile game market share accounts for 30%. Tencent, NetEase, Nintendo, Ubisoft, and other major game developers have used the Cocos engine to develop and launch their game products.

Starting from mobile games, the Cocos engine has grown into a more universal tool across multiple fields. In the field of smart cars, Cocos is also being used to create functional interaction in different scenarios between people and vehicles and vehicles and the outside world. Multi-modal interactive smart cockpit products based on the Cocos 3D rendering engine will also be launched shortly.

In online education, Cocos launched the Cocos ICE courseware editor for education companies. This is an interactive courseware editor that can be used quickly without coding. It has strong compatibility and can be customized. Cocos currently has more than 90% of the Chinese market in this new online education sector.

At the end of 2021, Baidu released the metaverse product “Xi Rang” to accelerate the creation of the metaverse. Cocos has recently become a partner of Baidu, providing a technical platform base for the metaverse world. The two parties will jointly build a metaverse world over time.