Company: Unity Technologies, Inc., San Francisco, CA
Entry Submitted By: Point Blank Communications
Company Description: Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, an intuitive and flexible development platform used to make wildly creative and intelligently interactive 3D and 2D content. The "author once, deploy everywhere" capability ensures developers can publish to all of the most popular platforms. Unity Technologies boasts a thriving community of 1,000,000 registered developers.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year - Up to 2,500 Employees

Nomination Title: Unity Technologies, Inc.

Tell the story about what this nominated organization achieved since January 1 2011 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Unity Technologies is revolutionizing the game industry with Unity, our breakthrough engine and development tools for creating multiplatform games, simulations, visualizations, and other interactive content. Unity is focused on taking the pain out of game development with technology that is both uniquely usable and extremely powerful. Unity’s game development crosses industries, platforms, and genres.

In 2011, Unity broke new ground with not only our technology development platform, but also into key new industries for software developers. We continue to put forth our vision of democratizing game development to enable everyone to create rich interactive 3D content for an incredible range of platforms. The Unity 3.5 open beta began in 2011 and the full-product released in early 2012. Our massive Unity 3.5 free product update is packed with cutting-edge features and improvements including:

Shuriken Particle System; Improved Pathfinding;
Upgraded Occlusion Culling & new LOD;
Native Client deployment;
Linear Space Lighting and HDR; and much more.

‘The release also includes a developer preview of the highly anticipated, Adobe® Flash® Player deployment add-on.

Unity’s business model has revolutionized the games industry and generates revenue strong enough to keep Unity Technologies profitable and growing. The way products are packaged and priced, with both free and affordable premium versions, has allowed developers of all sizes to adopt and stay with Unity. This business model, created by Unity’s CEO and co-founder David Helgason, is now widely copied throughout the industry.

Unity now has more than 1,000,000 registered users, up 700,000 from just over a year ago. 300,000 - 30% of all registered users - are active on a monthly basis.Registered developers with Unity include Bigpoint, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, Disney, Electronic Arts, LEGO, Microsoft, NASA, Nickelodeon, Ubisoft, US Army, Warner Bros., large and small studios, independent professionals, students and hobbyists.

In 2011, we also made many key announcements and business partnerships to further Unity’s growth. These included:

• Unity acquired animation technology firm Mecanim, Inc. to form Unity Canada. The new branch will integrate their next-gen animation technology straight into the Unity development platform - a first for the engine industry.
• Unity announced a partnership and agreement with GREE, the leading mobile social gaming platform in Japan, making GREE a master-license holder, paving the way for companywide adoption of Unity for game development.
• Expansion of global operations, localization, and support with new offices in Sweden, Korea, and Japan, joining headquarters in San Francisco and global offices in Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, UK.
• Unity 3.x and the Unity Web Player were certified by the US Army and Air Force to be installed on their secure networks, meaning that Unity can be used to create and deploy serious game applications for the US Army and Air Force.
• Unity’s Union business group announced agreements with Roku and Nokia to bring games in the Union program to the Roku 2 set-top box and Nokia N9 smartphone.
• Unity secured 12 million dollars in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader of this nominated company:

David Helgason is CEO and co-founder of Unity Technologies, Inc., where he leads Unity's core mission to democratize game development through powerful, yet affordable and easy-to-use, tools that level the playing field between developers small and large.

Helgason has created groundbreaking business models for Unity that have not only revolutionized the game industry, but are also now widely copied. He passionately leads the global company each day by distilling the essence of Unity Technologies throughout every department and sparking the creative process for further growth.

An entrepreneur, visionary, and ex-programmer, Helgason has founded and participated in startups in many fields such as news and community integration, music distribution, and consulting. He also currently serves on the boards of several games and technology startups.