Nebula Studios closes $45M seed to build cloud-native indie engine 'Aurora'

Gaming · 5 min read

Nebula Studios announced a $45 million seed round to build Aurora, a lightweight engine that runs both client-side and in the cloud for streaming and collaborative workflows. The startup targets indie developers who want rapid iteration, real-time collaboration, and integrated analytics without the complexity of large engines.

Aurora offers a modular pipeline with hot-reloadable assets, a cloud sandbox for playtesting with remote collaborators, and first-class tools for live operations like A/B testing and content rollout. Nebula says the engine's API simplifies networked persistence and content patching across platforms.

The funding will be used to scale infrastructure partnerships and expand toolsets, including a visual shader editor and a hosted physics service. Nebula emphasizes a developer-first approach with a revenue share model for smaller studios and a managed hosting plan for teams that prefer offloading backend operations.