W4 Games, which provides enterprise technology and support for the open-source Godot Engine, has raised $18 million in funding.
The Series B funding will help the company expand its international team by 50%, accelerate development of its enterprise offering, and support growing demand from enterprise developers using Godot. Godot’s growth is significant, with revenues expected to surpass $1 billion next year for Godot-based game companies, the company said.
Tencent led the round, with support from other investors including OSS Capital, LUX, Naval Ravikant and Tobias Lutke’s family office.
W4 Games has also signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Tencent to help the company scale its business, and the Godot ecosystem in Asia. The Series B funding brings W4 Games’ total funding raised to date to $33 million.
The collaboration marks a significant milestone for the growing open-source video game
development ecosystem. Known for its flexibility and permissive licensing, Godot Engine has emerged as a leading open-source alternative to proprietary video game engines, supported by a rapidly expanding global developer community.
W4 Games was founded by core Godot developers and contributors to help bring Godot Engine to the enterprise market, providing tools, support, and services that enable studios of all sizes to build and ship video games with the engine.
Godot has seen significant growth over the past five years. According to SteamDB, the number of Godot video games published on Steam grew by more than 50% year-on-year in both 2024 and 2025. Analysis of Gamalytic data by W4 Games also indicates that the number of Godot video games generating more than $1 million in annual sales has risen from two to more than 50 in the last three years.
Popular Game Jam events such as Global Game Jam and GMTK Game Jam also point to a generational shift towards Godot, whose share of submitted video games has grown from 10% to 50% since 2022.
Under the agreement, W4 Games and Tencent will also work together to expand the reach of Godot Engine among enterprises, video game studios and developers in Asia. The partnership will support the development and adoption of W4 technologies through the region. This will include go-to-market initiatives, localization, ecosystem support, advocacy and market development.
“This collaboration with Tencent marks an important next step for W4 Games as we expand globally and bring Godot to more studios and developers,” said Nicola Farronato, co-CEO of W4 Games. “With Tencent as both a strategic partner and an investor, we have an opportunity to accelerate the adoption of enterprise-ready Godot technologies, particularly in Asia, while continuing to strengthen the open-source ecosystem that sits at the heart of everything we do.”
In an interview with GamesBeat, Farronato said, “We have agreed a multi-year business collaboration to accelerate both Godot and the R&D pipeline of W4. So W4 is constantly investing a lot in getting new products out related to the game engine, and this will accelerate what we are doing. That is very important and crucial to us because the Godot Engine has started another piece of the journey, growing very fast with a lot of appetite in the enterprise segment.”
“Over the past few years, Godot has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-growing game engine technologies, with W4 Games at the forefront of its adoption by major studios and enterprises. We’re excited to work with Tencent to build on the momentum and further establish Godot Engine as a leading platform for companies creating the next generation of video games,” said Juan Linietsky, Godot Engine creator and W4 Games founder, in a statement.
Acceleration thanks to a new generation of game developers
“There is a generational change happening,” particularly with signs that some developers are migrating from Unity to Godot, at least in relation to the use of game engines for game jams, said Farronato. He credited more ownership, better economics and an ecosystem of support rather than a proprietary closed solution.
He added, “We’ve been saying this thing about the new generation of developers for the last few years, and now what we’re seeing is that people who started maybe as students five years ago now are in the industry, and now they’re influencing their teams. There’s multiple companies that we talk to where the conversation would go something like, “We use Unity, maybe Unreal, and we have some of our team that are experimenting with Godot.”
And he said, “The adoption and learning curve is shallow. The beachhead we’re seeing in a lot of companies is prototyping. So it starts with prototyping because you can get things out really quickly, and then a lot of them are thinking” of continuing with the same tech that they use for prototyping.
Farronato said the driver is on the education level, where students learn about in computer science classes such as those taught at universities in Finland, Ireland and more in the U.S.
“On the investor side, we are talking to VCs, and there is definitely a growing number of content creators in related rounds that now are using using Godot,” he said.
I noted that Tencent is also an investor in Epic Games, the maker of the Unreal Game Engine. But Farronato only noted that Tencent is a minority investor in Epic Games. That means that Tencent is not in control of Epic Games.
Second Dinner, which raised more than $100 million, is using Godot for a major game, Farronato said. Second Dinner, the maker of Marvel Snap, invested in Godot in a previous round.
He noted the the economics of making games is getting harder, and it’s hard to make a profit, so more companies realize they have to make games faster and cheaper. Godot has no licensing fees, and it is picking up more 3D graphics capabilities. I also asked about AI and the Godot engine.
“From what I can say, I think Godot is the the most exploited game engine if you use the AI lens,” Farronato said. “A lot of startups are building on Godot. There’s a lot being built there. And by design, the codebase is relatively smaller than other competitors, as well as its source is available.”
The AI connection with Godot
He noted internally at game companies there is a lot of use of agentic AI for productivity, but not so much generative AI.
Some of our clients are helping us look. “What I want from AI is if I have talent [working for me], I want five times the output from that talent because the talent race is becoming harder, and I can amplify the reach of this talent thanks to this layer of technology.”
This explains the strong correlation between the use of Godot and the use of agentic AI.
Asked why developers are working with W4 Games, Farronato said that W4 Games is the “most sophisticated, equipped, deep diving Godot company that can offer serious enterprise services like we do.”
That includes co-design, co-development, support of any kind, he said.
“We’ve done consoles. We have been the biggest Godot donor from inception. A lot trust in Godot for a big budget project,” Farronato said. “We are embarking now on a huge budget project, a multi-year with” probably a 2030 launch date. The aim is to help de-risk such projects, Farronato said.
How Godot engine is governed
W4 Games expects its contribution to the Godot Engine project to continue growing alongside its enterprise business. Wherever possible, improvements developed through its work with enterprise customers are contributed upstream to Godot, enabling advances developed for individual studios to benefit the wider developer community.
W4 Games is the enterprise partner for Godot Engine, providing commercial tools, cloud
services, and professional support to help game studios build and ship games with the
open-source Godot Engine. The Godot engine itself is MIT-licensed and developed by a worldwide community, stewarded by the independent non-profit Godot Foundation.
Relevant for the Tencent partnership is that W4 Games and Godot are focused on expanding in the Chinese games market.
“We are currently working a lot primarily with North America, a little bit in Europe where there is a solid good user base which is growing. But of course, Asia is a market to explore,” Farronato said. “Thanks to this collaboration, we would like to generate acceleration into this space.”
Farronato said the investors are interested in R&D under way at Godot, and they have noticed that this year revenues for Godot-based companies could exceed $500 million and that it could surpass $1 billion fairly quickly.
Four years ago, there were fewer than 10 games making more than $1 million, and now more than 2,000 Godot-based games have published on Steam.
Farronato said the game jam success is “mind blowing,” and he noted it is purely organic. There is no sponsorship, or partnership arrangement with the game jams.
“Godot moved from a hobbyist technology to a to a more professional technology with Godot 4, which was in 2023, onward,” Farronato said. “It has improved a lot and the product is much better.”
The opportunity for Godot in China exists in part because Unity decided to pull out, Farronato said.
There’s a parallel between China and Godot and China and other tech. For instance, Arm, the chip architecture company, had to pull out of China due to concerns about politics, as the U.S. in particular did not want China using the most advanced tech.
But RISC-V, which is based in Switzerland, decided to focus on open source and tech that was neutral. Adoption for RISC-V has been rising rapidly around the world, in part because of its political neutrality.
“Godot is technically a community-led project,” Farronato said. “There is a formal formal entity which is called the Godot Foundation, which is technically legally based in the Netherlands at the moment.”
The Godot Foundation is responsible for driving the Godot engine. W4 Games helped create the foundation, and the community is driving the agenda. W4 Games is part of the board of the foundation.