Fast-growing game engine startup Unity loses its CFO

Unity Technologies, the highly valued startup behind one of the most popular game development tools, lost its CFO Mike Foley last week, Business Insider (paywalled) reported.

A company spokesperson confirmed the CFO’s departure, saying it was a “friendly and mutual decision between both parties,” while also noting that the company was searching for a replacement and had some candidates and hoped to announce more details soon.

In a statement, Foley told TechCrunch, “I look forward to seeing Unity’s continued success under its strong leadership team.”

Unity has raised north of $600 million at a valuation over $3 billion, CEO John Riccitiello confirmed to us earlier this week. In an interview at our Disrupt SF 2018 conference, Riccitiello told TechCrunch that the company’s game engine platform now powers about half of all new games.

In April, Riccitiello told the publication Cheddar that the company was on the “general path” toward an IPO. “We’re not putting out dates but I do believe the company is strong enough financially to go public now.”

The company is not the only third-party game engine tool available for developers, but Unity has become a favorite for indie developers due in large part to the breadth of integrations for various game platforms and the ease of deploying to them. The game engine company was started 14 years ago scraped from the remains of a failed video game title, but has begun to grow rapidly in the past couple years particularly due to investor bullishness around AR/VR and the potential for a real-time rendering engine to shape everything from manufacturing design to autonomous systems training.

Update: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Foley left his position in June, rather than last week.

(Original source)