Epic Games closed an epic amount of funding on Thursday.
The video game studio announced it raised $1.78 billion, which includes infusions of new capital and purchases from employee equity holders. The round also includes a $250 million investment from Sony, which was announced last month. Among other investors were Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research, Lightspeed Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price.
“Having the support of leaders in the financial community accelerates Epic’s efforts to build a new kind of digital ecosystem using real-time 3D technology, services that connect hundreds of millions of people, and a digital storefront that offers a fair business model. We are delighted to have them as part of the Epic family,” Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said in a statement.
The new funding brings the company’s valuation to $17.3 billion.
Epic Games is most well known for creating the smash hit video game Fortnite. Although Fortnite was released in 2017, the game continues to be popular. Fortnite earned $1.8 billion in revenue in 2019, even though the game is free to download and play — the only thing users pay for is cosmetic in-game items like character skins and dances. In April, almost 28 million players logged in to watch the game’s virtual Travis Scott concert.
Epic Games is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, but it launched its first office in the Seattle area in 2012. Epic’s Bellevue location currently employs more than 80 people in the area, although employees have been working remotely since the middle of March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company is hiring for Bellevue-based roles and several remote positions. The Seattle-area team works on Epic’s online services, augmented and virtual reality products and Unreal Engine game development software, among other things. The open positions are largely roles in engineering or software development.
