Improbable that UK startup is worth $1bn price tag? Don't bet against it

The idea that the next British unicorn (the term for a startup valued over $1bn) could be the developer of a cloud-computing platform for video games seems, well, improbable. But that's what's happened, following an enormous $502m investment in London-based Improbable from Japan's SoftBank corporation. In a single transaction, the sum – which is for a minority stake in the company, with its three founders, Herman Narula (29) Rob Whitehead (26) and Peter Lipka (28) still holding the majority of shares – took the firm into the big league. Improbable's core product is a middleware platform, a piece of software used by developers to fulfil a specific role within a program or service. Named SpatialOS, it lets game-makers build multiplayer virtual worlds that can handle more players online at the same time than typical programming techniques allow. Classic massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, such as World of Warcraft or Destiny, rely on techniques such as splitting players up over different servers, so each cluster only has to deal with a few thousand players at once, or "instancing", throwing groups of friends into their own unique versions of the world where they don't have to deal with strangers at all.