SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – MAY 30, 2024 – Hypersonic Laboratories, the company building HELIX, the next-generation multiplayer role-playing (RP) sandbox Platform, today announced it has raised $7 million in a Series A funding round. Led by Play Ventures, who also led the previous round, the current round included participation from AppWorks, WTIC, KB Investment, and Alex Ekvall. This latest round brings Hypersonic’s total funding to $11 million. The new funds will be used to expand the Hypersonic Laboratories team and prepare for HELIX’s Closed Alpha launch later this year.

“We’ve followed Jack (Maker) and his team closely since their earliest days and have increasingly been amazed by their big vision and ability to execute,” said Kenrick Drijkoningen, General Partner at Play Ventures. “We are excited to support them on their journey to empower creators and players with HELIX. This may well be the biggest new gaming platform in over a decade.”

Embracing an Underserved Community

Despite the immense popularity of RP mods and servers across various games, the industry has long neglected this thriving community, providing little to zero commercial or professional support, sometimes even going after the mod creators in an effort to shut them down. This community has continued to grow while fighting this uphill battle:

• For the last several years, RP consistently ranks as the #1 streamed and watched game genre on Twitch.
• FiveM (a popular mod for GTA V which allows people to play and host custom roleplay servers) has more active players than GTA V on Steam and hit a record 300,000 concurrent players in January 2024, which makes it even more popular than heavy hitters such as PUBG and Apex Legends on Steam.
• RP entered mainstream conversation with prominent rappers such as T-Pain, Lil Durk, and Tee Grizzley getting involved with GTA RP, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.
• Despite being nearly 20 years old, Garry’s Mod continues to attract a highly active player base who mostly play on RP servers, making it the 43rd most played game on Steam.
• Five out of the top ten earning games on Roblox are RP games, averaging $27M per year. 

Building the Ultimate Moddable Game

As an avid car enthusiast, Hypersonic Laboratories founder and CEO Jack Kim (who goes by Maker online) grew up as a big fan of open-world driving games such as GTA V. However, Maker found himself spending even more time modding than actually playing the game itself. Now, Maker and his team are several years into building their dream open-world sandbox game, HELIX, which allows anyone to easily create, share, and play mods and servers.

“I had all these cool cars I wanted but couldn’t afford in real life, so I would download 3D models of them online and mod them into the game. I used unofficial modding tools developed by the community, which, since most games are never made to be modded, were very difficult to use and could even break the game. I even downloaded a virus that almost destroyed my PC,” said Maker. “It shouldn’t be that hard for the millions of people out there who want to mod or play modded games, but until HELIX, there’s just never been a professional toolset or platform built by modders, for modding. Our team, cumulatively, has built mods and modding frameworks with more than 100M total downloads – all in their own free time. Imagine what they can do now that they’re actually being paid to do it!”

Unmatched Credibility and Vision

Hypersonic Laboratories is led by a team of veterans from various gaming companies such as Roblox/Uplift Games, Hypixel Studios, Activision, Kongregate, GameStop, and more. The company is also announcing the addition of Kasey Fitton (aka Mycroft), the former lead of ESX, a popular FiveM framework which is used by more than 25,000 RP servers, and Joshua Eger (aka Kakarot), the creator of QBCore, another hugely popular FiveM framework. HELIX has already started to pick up some buzz in the RP developer circle, with several prominent RP modders already experimenting with the platform to create incredible worlds and player experiences. 

For more information on Hypersonic Laboratories, please visit their website and follow on X, or LinkedIn.  A corporate fact sheet and leadership biographies can be found in the press kit here. Initially launched as a Web3 product with an in-game economy powered by an NFT marketplace, HELIX has recently shifted to a traditional Web2 platform, completely removing any use of blockchain technology and NFTs.

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About Hypersonic Laboratories

Hypersonic Laboratories was founded by Jack Kim (Maker) with a vision to create a multiplayer sandbox game platform without the limitations of traditional game development tools. Backed by industry-leading investors and driven by a team of passionate modders and developers, Hypersonic Laboratories is set to revolutionize the RP gaming community with HELIX. Hypersonic is primarily a US and UK-based company, but is fully remote with employees across the globe. To check out open roles, visit https://www.hypersoniclaboratories.com/careers.

About HELIX

HELIX is the first-ever open-world multiplayer sandbox game dedicated to the RP community Inside HELIX, users can create and explore immersive worlds with Unreal Engine 5-powered graphics, supporting over 1,000 players simultaneously. HELIX offers unparalleled flexibility and creativity, liberating the modding community from the constraints imposed by traditional game developers. HELIX is currently in pre-alpha and is in the hands of external creators for feedback. Creators can apply on the HELIX website for early access.

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