French startup Powder snaps up $14 million for game clip sharing

French startup Powder has closed $14 million in Series A funding to build “the ultimate companion app” for gaming, which lets players share short videos of the action. The round was led by Serena, including General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Alven Capital, Bpifrance through its fund Digital Venture, Secocha Ventures, Turner Novak, and Kevin Hartz. Essentially the Parisian company is building the video infrastructure of social gaming, recording players’ games and using AI to identify the highlights of play, also known as “game clips”. These highlights are compiled from all platforms into one app, from which anyone can launch games with friends. The idea came in December 2019 when the team created a community on Discord to understand how gamers were creating game clips.

“The community literally blew up and rapidly reached over 50,000 members,” says Stanislas Coppin, co-founder and CEO. “When we realized how much people wanted to create, edit and share game clips, we knew we were onto something that could impact millions of gamers across all gaming platforms.” This round brings total funding to $18 million, after a pre-seed round of $400,000 in August 2018, a seed round of $1.5 million in March 2019, and then a $1.3 million extension last May. The company was founded by four second-time entrepreneurs: CEO Stanislas Coppin, the co-founder of Mindie, a pioneering music videos mobile app which exited; Barthélémy Kiss (Chief Growth Officer), the co-founder of Artomatix, an AI-powered 3D content creation software, which sold to game engine Unity in 2020; Yannis Mangematin (Chief Content Officer), who was at the start of Soixante Quinze, a production company, and of Konbini, a media group focused on Gen Z; and CTO Christian Navelot, who led the technical team of EmoJam, a musical emojis app.

Photo: Powder co-founders