Square Enix Invests into Pragma Alongside Industry’s Top Venture Firms
[Culver City, March 11, 2025] – Pragma, the leading backend game engine empowering studios to build scalable, live-service games, today announced the successful closure of $12.75M in strategic fundraising. The 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 $50M.
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. “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 and Co-Founder of Pragma. “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.
For more information, visit www.pragma.gg or contact press@pragma.gg.
About Pragma
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. Pragma has raised more than $50 million and is backed by leading investors including Upfront Ventures, Greylock Partners and Insight Partners.
The Pragma Backend Game Engine is the only backend solution that is truly extensible and comes with source code access. Game designers and engineers aren’t blocked by restrictive black-box features, and your studio isn’t trapped into a framework that you’ll inevitably grow out of. The Pragma Backend Game Engine is also capital and resource efficient. Studios no longer need to hire and maintain a large backend team while still getting the reliability and scalability required for modern online service games.
Renee Sogueco