Pragma, a backend game engine empowering studios to build scalable, live-service games, said it has raised $12.75 million in strategic funding raising.
Pragma‘s funding included participation from the industry’s top venture firms and Square Enix, a global leader in game publishing and development. The new investment brings the company’s total funds raised to over $50 million.
Los Angeles-based Pragma was founded by engineering veterans who built platforms for some of the largest live service games, including League of Legends and Destiny 2.
The Pragma engine powers matchmaking, analytics, monetization, player data, and more, allowing developers to hone their creativity toward building games while offloading the complexity of building a stable multiplayer game infrastructure. Studios like Gardens Interactive, People Can Fly, Frost Giant Studios, Square Enix External Studios and more use Pragma to power their games.
“This investment aligns with our commitment to support innovation and excellence in the gaming industry,” said Hideaki Uehara, general manager of investment and business development at Square Enix Holdings, in a statement. “Pragma’s cutting-edge solutions deliver seamless and scalable gaming experiences. We believe this collaboration will drive significant growth and innovation, benefiting both our company and the broader gaming community.”
This investment marks a major milestone for Pragma and reinforces the ongoing success of Pragma’s mission to provide studios with the most robust and flexible game backend infrastructure. With this strategic round of investment, Pragma will further deepen its suite of live-service tools and services and allow for strategic M&A activity as needed. Further, Square Enix’s investment gives them strategic access to Pragma’s technical expertise.
“Square Enix is renowned for delivering immersive, high-quality gaming experiences, and their investment is a testament to the strength of our technology and vision,” said Eden Chen, CEO of Pragma, in a statement. “This partnership enables us to accelerate product development that will allow for customers to get their game online cheaper and faster, at scale, with better tools for growing community and retaining their players.”
With the addition of the recently acquired FirstLook player engagement platform, Pragma now serves both the back-end and player front-end of launching any online game.
Since FirstLook’s launch in 2024, the company has helped onboard over 100,000 playtesters, facilitated 100+ playtest events, and supported 30 Discord communities. Developers already using Pragma will be able to use FirstLook’s latest integration features, including the ability to reward entitlements to players and manage limited-access events seamlessly.
Pragma has helped build some of the biggest video games and distributed systems in the world at Riot Games, PopCap, Google, Amazon, and EA for games like League of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite, Destiny 2, and Eve Online.
Origins
Other investors include Upfront Ventures, Greylock Partners and Insight Partners. Pragma has more than 50 employees. It was founded in 2020 by Eden Chen and Chris Cobb.
Prior to founding Pragma, Chen founded Fishermen Labs which built VR/XR and other tech solutions for some of the biggest tech companies including Snap, Meta and more. Eden is one of the top active angel investors and advisors in the games industry, investing in over 80-plus game studios and game tech in the last five years.
Prior to founding Pragma, Cobb was a backend tech lead at Riot Games where he shipped a patented matchmaking system that enabled seamless, competitive matches for tens of millions of League of Legends players worldwide. Cobb also built and led the player behavior team, and Cobb was also CEO of Bot School before its acquisition by Phoenix Labs and has shipped many other successful online games throughout his career, including Dauntless, Bejeweled Blitz, Plants vs Zombies and many more.
As for the inspiration, Chen and Cobb had had firsthand experience building live-service infrastructures for huge titles like League of Legends and Destiny 2. They realized that studios were rebuilding complex backend infrastructure every time they ship a game, so they started building tools to help studios focus on the most important things (building a great game), saving them time and money.
In light of recent macroeconomic challenges including increased game budgets and related layoffs, Pragma was developed to help reduce the massive upfront costs that go into online game development without sacrificing quality, reliability and flexibility.
Pragma democratizes the process of developing games by building a robust, modular backend platform. The engine allows developers to launch online-enabled experiences without massive engineering teams, giving developers more time to focus on the creative side of game development and offloading the complexities of backend development.
Their founding thesis has proved correct: last year, there were 18,927 games released on Steam, and 2025 looks like it will increase on that. With numerous studios continuing to lay off incredible developers — a number of which have struck out to make their own games and IP, the market continues to grow. And many of these folks are traditionally game makers–not engineers–with Pragma here to ensure they have all their online services needs met, right out of the box.
PlayFab is the main competitor in the space. PlayFab was founded back in 2014, and the focus was primarily on casual mobile games; eventually sold to Microsoft in 2018. Since then, online service games have dramatically increased in complexity (e.g. cross platform PC/Console and battle royales weren’t even a thing back then) and no other backend product has kept up with the evolution and development needs of these games.
Most companies in the space provide a basic toolset to get a game online, but Pragma said it is the only company that offers a fully customizable backend game engine with a suite of tools that give studios the flexibility to bring their game online. Pragma powers matchmaking, content management, live operations, and more, offering a developer-friendly system designed for long-term flexibility and growth of a game.
Plus, Pragma’s recent acquisition of FirstLook now offers studios a complete solution for game development. Pragma helps studios (like Dreamhaven, Stoke Games, and Night Street, 30+ in two months) get games online, and FirstLook helps developers engage with and grow their player communities, leading to more successful game launches.
Some of the games using Pragma include Spectre Divide, Predecessor, Stormgate, and Gardens’ upcoming flagship fantasy adventure game. Recently, Pragma helped power the early access launch of Seekers of Skyveil, created by ex-Riot developers David Banks and Christina Norman.
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