To meet powder, a French startup that lets you share video clips of your favorite games, follow and interact with people with the same interests. The company has raised $ 14 million in a Serena-led Series A round.
Powder wants to build the video infrastructure for social gaming. While many communities of gamers are already sharing content on Twitch, Discord, and Reddit, there is no dominant mobile app that focuses on gaming.
You could call it Instagram or Snapchat for gamers, but the startup has developed special tools that make it similar and yet different from the popular social platforms.
Powder can capture video content from any platform. You can record on your console and access your footage by connecting your account to Powder. You can record videos using the company’s desktop app on your PC. You can also record videos of mobile games.
The company tries to identify the most relevant events in your favorite game. It can be when you score in the Rocket League, when you are the last person in Fortnite, etc.
You can then trim your video, add filters, music and stickers, and share a video with your followers. Other users can exchange reactions, add comments, and send messages.
Credit: powder
In total, the company has raised $ 18 million and is fairly transparent about its funding history. In August 2018, the company raised a pre-seed round worth $ 400,000 with Kima Ventures and Zenly co-founders Antoine Martin and Alexis Bonillo. In March 2019, General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Dream Machine, SV Angel, Brian Pokorny, Florian Kahn and Guillaume Luccisano invested $ 1.5 million.
Around May 2020, the company had to raise a start-up capital extension of USD 1.3 million with Alven Capital, Seraam Invest, Farmers, Maxime Demeure, Jean-Nicolas Vernin and some existing investors. Bpifrance and CNC have also put some money into the company. And now Serena is leading the Series A round worth $ 14 million. General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Alven Capital, the Bpifrance Digital Venture Fund, Secocha Ventures, Turner Novak and Kevin Hartz are also taking part in today’s round.
As you can see it was a long and winding road. That’s because Powder didn’t create a social app for gamers overnight. The company tried many different consumer apps. It would repeat an idea for a couple of weeks and then end the concept if it didn’t work out. With Powder, the company seems to have found a great distribution mechanism to attract more downloads, which leads to more users.
“The idea behind Powder started in December 2019. We had already worked on several projects and none of them really caught on. We thought we’d create a community first and then a product, ”Co-Founder and CEO Stanislas Coppin told me. He previously co-founded Mindie, a music video app.
Powder started as a Discord server with tens of thousands of members. The team then developed an app that would appeal to this community, the “Metaverse Camera,” as Coppin says. In total, 1.5 million people have downloaded the iOS app since it was launched.
There are three other co-founders, Barthélémy Kiss, Yannis Mangematin and Christian Navelot. There are 18 employees and the company just got started on Android.
Credit: powder