Meet Improbable, The Startup Building The World's Most Powerful Simulations.

Improbable's founders Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead outside the converted barn where they started their company. (Photo: Jillian Edelstein for Forbes)

Every Friday just after lunch, the videogame developers at Bossa Studios in London’s East End take a break from all the coding to try out their own work.
This spring they were putting the finishing touches on Worlds Adrift, a so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which thousands of people floated across a virtual sky on ships, attacking one another.
They were hoping to build the next World of Warcraft, an MMORPG that grossed more than $1 billion last year.
Bossa’s game had the potential to be better because it would seem more real. To achieve that Bossa had turned to Improbable, another startup 2 miles to the west, which has invented a new way to simulate extremely complex systems.
A floating fantasy world is a perfect candidate for Improbable’s sim software. Traditional MMORPGs like World of Warcraft have to take serious shortcuts around reality to simplify the computational load for the game.
You can slay a dragon, for example, but it will respawn for thousands of other players to slay, too. Following basic rules of biology and physics is exceedingly difficult in virtual worlds, especially when handling the load of thousands of simultaneous players.
Reality is too expensive given the hundreds more servers needed to calculate the death of every tree, animal and person as an autonomous element in a living ecosystem. In Worlds Adrift, one player kills another creature and it’s really dead.
One day in March, as Bossa’s coders were play-testing their game, they picked up a flare gun meant only for signaling and threw it at another player. Sure enough it caused a red flash on the screen, indicating an injury.  But, says Bossa Studios cofounder Henrique Olifiers, “they hadn’t coded it as a weapon.”
The simulation was based on complex principles of physics and biology, and the rule that any physical object hurled with speed would do damage. Olifiers’ developers would normally have programmed a limited set of effects that every object in the game could have on the virtual world.
But here those effects were discovered in the game; a phenomenon known as “emergent game play.” The result was a virtual world almost as unpredictable as the real one. “We never know what the game is going to be like,” he says.
The game was also built for a fraction of the usual cost. A project on the scale of Worlds Adrift would typically take years and millions of dollars for a studio of Bossa’s size to build, but they did it in roughly a year and with just a core team of front-end developers.

A screen shot from Words Adrift. (Image via Bossa Studios)

Improbable was founded two and a half years ago by Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead, a pair of hyperkinetic computer scientists from the University of Cambridge.
In their ground floor office on a bland-looking block in Farringdon, a team of about 60 engineers from MIT, Goldman Sachs and Google GOOGL -0.93% sit at $40 desks writing code that could dramatically reshape not only how we play games but how large organizations make decisions.
Worlds Adrift, launching this autumn, will be the first public application of Improbable’s technology.
Meanwhile, Samsung has talked to the company about running simulations for its Internet of Things devices, and economists from Oxford are using it to run models of the U.K. housing market.
Improbable is also “talking heavily” to Britain’s Ministry of Defense, says Narula, the startup’s high-octane CEO. He’s tight-lipped about most projects because of contractual obligations but says Improbable has booked revenue in the single-digit millions of pounds since launching.
In March it raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz at a $100 million valuation, making it one of only two startups in London to take money from the Silicon Valley venture firm. It had turned down three other potential investors the year before.
“It was such a new and original idea,” says Chris Dixon, who led Andreessen’s investment. ”We see a lot of stuff, and we’d never seen anything like this.”
Improbable’s software is designed to simulate systems on an unprecedentedly massive scale: the economics of a national health care system; a nation suffering a virulent infectious disease outbreak; or the cascading effects of a hurricane on a 100-mile stretch of inhabited coastline.
A model of human immune system requires billions of entities that operate independently, but academics can build that for the first time on Improbable’s platform. “Suddenly your business can simulate the supply chain,” says Narula, or see what happens when you put hand sanitiser into a public transportation system for commuters.
Improbable’s tech can also replace the mundane testing that websites run all the time on live users, with a far richer series of tests on simulated humans in parallel virtual worlds.
The leap Improbable made is in how dramatically it reduces the processing power needed to run complex, custom simulations. Instead of waiting for programs that move data from one server to another, Improbable unleashes a swarm of programs that dip in and out of the servers all at once.
Clients provide Improbable with their own “worker programs” that contain all the main components of a simulation, while Improbable manages the hard part of running the components on cloud or client servers, acting as a kind of operating system.

The more clients Improbable gets, the more it can expand its library of programs that other customers can reuse.For example, one game developer used the company’s platform earlier this year to build an enormous virtual world built on a grid, using fundamental physics principles on an unprecedented scale. Players could breathe and be exposed to different types of gasses that flowed from one section of the grid to the other.

Now an academic client that Narula is talking to could use some of the code built by the game developers for their project modelling energy usage in houses, simulating the movement of hot and cold air from room to room.

The potential in gaming itself is broad. Just as hardcore gamers are gravitating towards more realistic simulations, so too are the wider crowd of people playing casual games on their smartphones. Today’s generation of mobile gamers started off on a diet of simple games like Angry Birds, but they progressed through Candy Crush to more complex multiplayer games like Clash of Clans. Over time, more of us might want to play in complex worlds like Worlds Adrift.

“There’s a learning curve that this new cohort of users are going through,” says Ben Holmes, a partner at London-based Index Ventures who led investments into King.com and Supercell, but not Improbable. “That’s where this kind of technology, [from Improbable] might be useful.”

The effect in sum is a tool that could do for simulations what Amazon Web Services did for cloud computing – cutting the need to hire a raft of expensive computer scientists or rent more servers.

“Improbable is trying to be the world’s ‘what if’ machine,” says Narula.

Sitting in a tiny meeting room at his company’s headquarters in London, Narula sports slightly-overgrown black hair that skews to one side and talks at a machine-gun clip, a tightly-coiled barrel of energy. The moment he takes a seat his leg involuntarily bounces up and down, and if he’s not pacing in front of a white board he’s flipping a marker over and over.

Born in Delhi, India, Narula moved to the U.K. when he was 3. His father, Harpinder Singh Narula, ran a successful family construction business operating in Africa, India and the Middle East, and sent his son to the elite Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys School for high school.
Narula’s two brothers, the older more than eight years his senior, went on to work in the family businesses, but Narula wanted to code, teaching himself to write in C++ at 12. While studying computer science at Cambridge he met Rob Whitehead, a Liverpudlian who had paid his way through college by selling weapons on the virtual-world site Second Life.
They began working on an ambitious virtual-world videogame in which you could drop an object, then log back in the next day and find it still there. When they couldn’t find software to help them scale up, they built the tools themselves.
“Eventually we realized the tech we were working on was bigger than the game,” says Whitehead.
In early 2012, just months before he was due to graduate, Narula told his parents he was ditching the family business to run his own startup. “It was a bit of a shock,” he says, adding that he gave up an inheritance that could have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. “Indian families are tightly knit. You get dispossessed if you don’t contribute.”

The founders spent £20,000 to cover their first six months of costs. One of their lead software engineers maxed out three credit cards to buy equipment. Then Narula borrowed $1.5 million from friends and family to get Improbable through its first two and a half years in a converted barn next door to his family home in North London, where about a dozen early staffers ate, slept and coded. Narula and Whitehead held interviews in their shower room.

Narula has no regrets about sidestepping the family business. “People think there’s security in great wealth and that people who make it in a big way must come from a hungry background.”

For Narula it’s enough to want to “build worlds and daydreams. Look at the stars. I can’t go there, but I can build the worlds myself.”

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