The world’s first OS for the cloud: our investment in Hadean

Today we are delighted to announce we have led a £7.2 million round in Hadean.

We are still using a technology stack that is, at its foundations, 40 years old.

Thanks to cloud development platforms, software is increasingly able to scale across thousands of servers. The apps on your phone, the websites you browse, or the storage you use online for photos can now be powered by vast compute power which used to cost millions and was only available if you had a supercomputer.

But the operating systems used today were not designed for the cloud. Current architectures are built upon outdated infrastructure and involve clunky layers of middleware, and hours of development time. The result is that many complex applications struggle to be built without high rates of failure and unpredictability (large- scale simulations, for example), or simply require more time and manpower to manage (big data processing, for instance).

And cloud usage is only going to go up. Take AI, as an example. Machine learning algorithms require more data than ever to be effective, and so consequently more and more compute power. To put that into context- AlphaGo Zero in 2018 used 300,000x more compute power than AlexNext in 2012. Companies wanting to use these techniques can theoretically access unlimited compute power in the cloud, but most have to hire armies of distributed systems engineers devOps to distribute the code, using an excessive amount of middleware and a highly complex development cycle.

***

Today we are delighted to announce we have led a £7.2 million round in Hadean, the deep tech company based in London, UK. Hadean is developing cloud-first operating system, with the bold goal of re-defining the technology stack for modern computing. Hadean's operating system enables programmers to scale their code, treating entire cloud-data centers as a single gigantic computer.

Aether engine: building large scale virtual worlds

One of the first use-cases of this technology is to enable simulations of unprecedented size and scale, for which Hadean has built Aether Engine. This is one of the hardest problems to solve from a technical standpoint; scaling parallel lines of data across multiple servers is one thing, scaling objects that move in time and space is another.

Gamers have long been waiting for experiences that enable thousands to interact together in one game world. Just yesterday, CCP Games, the creators of the MMO Eve Online, announced it is partnering with Hadean to build the largest online battle ever fought. CCP Games currently holds the record with 6,142 players; at GDC it plans to have 10,000 players.

Meanwhile, researchers who want to understand systems have struggled to replicate the complexity of the real-world. 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.

We look forward to partnering with Craig, Rashid and the team at Hadean on its mission to power massive, real-time distributed applications.