Large-scale simulated worlds startup Improbable Ltd. has raised $20 million Series A in a round that included Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz.

Founded in 2012, the company is developing an operating environment that makes building simulated worlds possible. No, it’s not the Sims, versus actual simulated worlds which are run in real time and simulate the behaviours and interactions of millions of people and objects

The utility of the idea is to provide a unique insight to those looking to ask questions of complex systems. The application is not just in gaming, but also in modelling real-world problems in areas including defence, energy, city efficiency, health, and finance.

Investor Chris Dixon explains its better in a post on his blog:

Improbable’s technology solves the parallelization problem for an important class of problems: anything that can be defined as a set of entities that interact in space…Developers who use Improbable can write code as if it will run on only one machine (using whatever simulation software they prefer, including popular gaming/physics engines like Unity and Unreal), without having to think about parallelization. Improbable automatically distributes their code across hundreds or even thousands of machines, which then work together to create a seamlessly integrated, simulated world.

Imagine a massive online world with millions, if not billions of items and characters, all of which act independently of each other, and that’s probably the easiest way to conceive what Improbable (the name is intentionally ironic) is aiming to deliver.

The company is said to be currently working with “a carefully selected group of studios” to develop the first uses of its technology, so it’s not inconceivable that you may see, at least in part, the tech in action in online gaming with-in the next three to five years.

Prior to this round, Probable had raised an Angel round of £1.3 million ($1.93 million) from Amadeus Capital Partners.