A gaming studio is building a professional learning and collaboration metaverse which it claims is a ‘Roblox for enterprise’.
Pixaera has raised around £5 million in early-stage funding “to bring the standard and engagement of high-quality games from the world’s best studios to the professional world”.
This funding consists of two rounds – £1.1m of pre-seeding and £3.9m led by early-stage EMEA investor, LocalGlobe. The founders of FACEIT, the competitive gaming platform for online multiplayer games, also participated; as did ERM, a leader in the renewable energy services sector, and York IE.
Pixaera was founded in 2020 by avid gamer and industry veteran Mousa Yassin. He saw how gaming teaches players vital skills – from problem-solving, to creative thinking, teamwork, and goal-setting – whilst also being incredibly engaging.
“I started to wonder why the gaming industry, being so sophisticated and technologically mature, had not considered building for the corporate and professional world,” said the CEO.
“There was such a gap between how players learn and collaborate organically and fluently in successful games, with the more old-school, unengaging learning experiences we have all been through as employees – even in roles where the stakes are high.
“Gamers willingly spend hundreds of hours developing their skills while in contrast, companies pay vast sums for online content that has to be forced onto their workforce and fails to truly deliver value.”
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Instead of making employees watch long training videos, or attend real-world, expensive training exercises, Pixaera offers a growing catalogue of experiential VR and PC-based games. Each module is built using development tools to address global training needs in safety, leadership, mental health and technical topics in a highly scalable way.
The product is being used by companies including Shell, GE and BP.
“There is no reason why VR/MR and gaming cannot be the leading tools for professional learning and collaboration across any industry, world-wide; as the technology develops, the applications are endless,” Yassin continued.