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Herman Narula

CEO
Improbable

About

Herman Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Improbable, a UK-based venture builder that has spent over a decade solving some of the hardest technical challenges at the frontier of AI, web3, and virtual worlds. Born in Delhi and raised in the UK, Herman studied Computer Science at Girton College, Cambridge - where a shared conviction about the untapped potential of virtual worlds brought him together with co-founder Rob Whitehead. The two founded Improbable directly after graduating in 2012.
Under Herman's leadership, Improbable grew from a Cambridge startup into a globally recognised technology company, raising $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2015, followed by a landmark $502 million round led by SoftBank in 2017. He steered the company through its pioneering work on SpatialOS and large-scale simulation, through defence and entertainment contracts, and into its current incarnation as a venture builder operating at the intersection of AI and web3.
Beyond building companies, Herman is a prominent voice on the future of virtual worlds and their societal implications. His 2022 book Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience (Penguin Random House) argues that humans have always sought meaning through conceptual communities - and that the metaverse represents the next frontier of that instinct. His 2019 TED talk, The Transformative Power of Video Games, made the case that games are one of the most egalitarian and underestimated forces in human connection. Herman believes that the value created in virtual worlds must be shared with the communities that inhabit them, not concentrated in the hands of a few corporations