W4 Games is a new company from the creator of Godot Engine along with long-time contributors, and now they've managed to gain plenty of funding.

As a brief reminder, the idea of the new company was to provide commercial products and services like support plans and access to more restricted markets (like consoles) and generally support Godot Engine development. So all improvements made as part of W4 Games will go into Godot directly whenever possible.

In a new blog post, they've announced $8.5 million dollars from a "seed funding investment round" (a first ever round of funding for a company) led by OSS Capita, which is so far the world's only investor platform targeting commercial open source and LUX Capital who specialize in funding science and technology ventures. They also had help from the founder of Red Hat and Sisu Game Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on games.

They said that the funds will "be used to expand W4 Games’ core team and accelerate the development of a suite of products and services for the Godot ecosystem, enabling all developers to create and publish games and applications on all major platforms" with a roadmap planned to be shown at GDC 2023.

For a free and open source game engine, this is hopefully very welcome news to help put it along side the much bigger teams from Unity, Unreal and others.