In the early days Improbable did not have an office. It had Herman Narula's parents' house in Hertfordshire.
Narula was born in Delhi in 1988 and brought to Britain when he was three. His father, Harpinder Singh Narula, runs a family construction company, DSC, where both of Herman's older brothers work. His mother, Surina, is a philanthropist. Herman went to Haberdashers' Aske's in Elstree and then to Girton College, Cambridge, to study computer science.
The first money was about $1m in a loan from the Narula family, plus $1.2m from angel investors.
At Girton he met Rob Whitehead. They shared two things: a love of games and a reluctance to go into finance, the usual exit for Cambridge graduates.
What almost nobody mentions is who paid for the start. The first money was about $1m in a loan from the Narula family, plus $1.2m from angel investors. For a family that built its wealth on construction, that was a bet on a son's game-engine idea. The records read here do not say how the loan was discussed at home, and it would be wrong to guess.
The idea was SpatialOS, software for building simulations too big for one machine. In March 2015 Andreessen Horowitz led a $20m round. In May 2017 SoftBank led $502m, then the largest venture investment in a European tech company. NetEase added $100m in 2018 at a valuation above $2bn.
Then it nearly broke. In 2019 Unity blocked several SpatialOS games, and Epic Games helped put together a $25m fund for affected developers. The dispute was later resolved, but the company's core product had been shaken. It moved toward defence, the MSquared metaverse venture and, in 2023, sold its defence division. The same year it reported its first profit, GBP 11m on GBP 66m revenue.
A family loan carries a different weight than venture money. Investors can walk away from a bad bet. A father cannot, and a founder knows it. Narula, who has said little in the sources read about that pressure, has spent over a decade making sure the loan was never his family's mistake.