Ubique Networks Inc., a growing tech startup that improves the efficiency of eSports, is opening an office at Volta Labs in Halifax, its third Canadian office.

The company announced this week that it plans to employ about a dozen IT professionals in Halifax. They will work with its dual headquarters in Sydney and Whitby, Ont. Outside of Canada, Ubique has operations in Brazil, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

The company has developed a platform it calls Swarmio that helps ensure there is no time lag for gamers competing against one another from different parts of the world. It has attracted more than 25,000 competitive gamers, including more than 25 eSports influencers, with a combined audience of over 100 million followers.

“Ubique is growing very fast in terms of new users and new countries for our product, and this necessitates the scale up of our operations with highly specialized IT talent,” John Smith, the company’s Executive Vice-President for Sales, said in a statement. “We want to capitalize on the growing IT talent pool in Atlantic Canada, particularly Halifax. Our Halifax centre will be instrumental in our future development plans.”

Ubique aims to solve a huge problem with multi-player online games. When players in different parts of the world are playing one another, the system is much faster for the player closest to the server, giving that player an unfair advantage.

Ubique’s solution is to develop a network of remote servers, so the players are always playing on a server based roughly equal distances from each of them. Swarmio is a decentralized eSports platform with an automated tournament management system.

Swarmio was launched in Brazil earlier this year, and last month the platform was taken to Sri Lanka with a local partner, Sri Lanka Telecom, which is the largest telecom and ISP operator in the country. Negotiations are also under way to launch the platform in other Asian, European and Latin American countries.

Ubique hosted a US$100,000 charity cup tournament in Los Angeles in September with major gamers and influencers. Now the company is planning a series of tournaments in the Philippines in January.

The new Halifax office will contribute to research and innovation projects in collaboration with educational institutions in the region and outside.

“Volta is proud to offer space, programing and resources to innovative startups like Ubique through our Residency program,” said Malary Schurman, Manager, Special Projects at Volta. “Ubique is an excellent example of the growth that can be achieved when choosing Atlantic Canada as a home base for a technology company.”