Universal Foundry, a startup offering cloud infrastructure to Unreal Engine 5 game developers, has announced a new Universal Foundry Compute Grant for small game devs.
Targeting solo and and small game teams, the aim is to award select teams with gratis infrastructure accelerate their project’s development, said Albert Reed, CEO of Universal Foundry, in an interview with GamesBeat.
The grant will award select teams with free Universal Foundry Horde continuous integration (CI) cloud
infrastructure to support their game’s launch with applications now open through May 30, 2025 on the Universal Foundry website.
“Having previously founded a game studio, I understand first-hand how important working with great tools is for a game’s timely launch and for team retention,” said Reed. “Epic has provided developers with amazing cloud-based tools including Horde but it’s up to teams to deploy and operate these tools themselves. We built Universal Foundry to help teams work more efficiently – allowing them to focus on making great games and on releasing them faster, instead of managing servers.”
Reed added, “While turnkey technology costs can be prohibitive for the smallest teams, we are thrilled to offer our Compute Grant to assist select indie studios on their journey in 2025, as they work to release some amazing new games.”
Reed said that small Unreal Engine 5 teams launching mobile, console, or PC games in 2025 or 2026 are eligible, if they meet the technical requirements. For selected teams Universal Foundry will provide free service through their game’s launch window or the end of 2026, whichever comes first. Grant recipients will be notified of acceptance before June 30, 2025.
Universal Foundry accelerates Unreal Engine 5 game development teams of all sizes with first-of-its-kind turnkey cloud infrastructure that is both secure and scalable. Universal Foundry’s Horde continuous integration (CI) infrastructure reduces the need for team maintenance of on-prem servers and implementation of bespoke cloud deployments ultimately increasing game team efficiency.
Just some of the teams leveraging Universal Foundry’s services for their games have included Glass Bottom Games, OK Dinosaur and others with yet to be announced triple-A titles.
Reed cofounded the company in 2024 with Lucian Cesca. Reed had extensive background in game development, with Cesca grounded in high-security infrastructure engineering background. Reed led Boston-based Demiurge Studios for nearly 15 years, overseeing the team’s growth and contributions to major video game franchises, along with the release of several original games.
Reed and Cesca met while working on a financial services business. They started about a year ago based on the core idea of providing cloud infrastructure so that game developers could have a good experience working with cloud-based game engines.
“There are just very few companies who are really laser focused on improving ping time for developers, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Reed said. “What our product does is make it so that when an engineer checks in a change, a CPP file or whatever, it gets over to the artists and the tools team in the QA as quickly as possible. Nobody has to sit staring at a progress bar going for a really long time.”
Epic Games provides some tools to make that possible, but they’re complicated, and game developers want to make the video game and not operate a bunch of servers in the cloud.
“And there’s really no reason for 5,000 developers to all build their own cloud infrastructure in this day and age. So that’s sort of how we fit in,” Reed said. “I think games have this unique problem because we have more assets and textures and models and all this other stuff that needs to happen fast. We’ve fallen behind on making the developer experience really efficient and really wonderful. The solution is to start speeding it up so you don’t need to do it all on your local workstation.”
The company signed its first company in the third quarter of last year. The Universal Subscription starts at about $1,000 a month. The grants are a way to help indie developers with those costs.
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