Draper Esprit leads over £7m round into Hadean

Venture capital company Draper Esprit has revealed it is leading a £7m investment in Hadean, the London-headquartered deep tech company. The round also includes Aster and specialist gaming investor London Venture Partners. Existing investors Luminous Ventures and Entrepreneur First also participated.

Hadean has created the cloud-first operating system, HadeanOS, which it describes as “redesigning the technology stack for the scale and pace of modern computing”.

Software is increasingly able to scale across thousands of servers in the cloud. However, current architectures can be outdated and involve clunky layers of middleware, requiring excessive hours of development time. The result is that many complex applications struggle to be built at scale without high rates of failure or unpredictability (such as large simulations, which still predominantly use supercomputers) or simply require more resources such as time and manpower to manage (such as big data processing).

Hadean says HadeanOS enables programmers to scale their code, as it treats entire cloud data-centres as a single gigantic computer.

“Technology companies today are hampered by their ability to scale their platforms to meet demand and exploit data,” said Craig Beddis, Hadean’s co-founder and CEO.

“Our technology, which was derived from first principles, eliminates the significant manpower and time wasted on engineering and DevOps. I am excited to have an investor of the calibre of Draper Esprit on board, with its proven track record in deep tech investment leading this round.’’

Simon Cook, CEO Draper Esprit, said: “New technologies to enable developers to build applications that can scale in the cloud are sorely needed.

“As technology advances in areas such as AI, blockchain and simulation, the complexity of the current software stack will only trip us up.

“Hadean have ripped up the rule book and redesigned the architecture from scratch. Their technology has been developed by world-class engineers and we are delighted to be partnering alongside Craig, Rashid and the rest of the team.”

One of the first use cases of this technology is in large scale simulations. As its first product, Hadean has built a distributed simulation engine, Aether Engine, which runs on its massively distributed, cloud-first operating system.

Aether Engine is already being used by the Francis Crick Institute to simulate large and complex models of protein-protein interactions, researching novel binding sites for tackling diseases like cancer.

Meanwhile, gaming studio CCP Games, creator of MMORPG EVE Online, has announced it will work with Hadean on Aether Wars, a 10,000-player experience that will set the new record for the largest number of players involved in a single online multiplayer battle. The current record is held by CCP Games, set at 6,142 players through EVE Online.