Jezby Ventures, the investment fund of OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba, has acquired Blade and its cloud gaming service Shadow following a commercial court order.
Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers that allows them to gain access to a gaming PC in a data center for a monthly subscription fee. However, unlike Google Stadia and other competitors in the space, the French startup Blade provides users with a full Windows 10 instance that allows them to install any software they want in addition to games and access it on any device.
Although Blade was able to raise over $100m since its founding in 2015 and reach 100,000 paid users, the company was unable to generate enough revenue to be self-sustainable. As a result, the company went into administration with the Paris Commercial Court.
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Takeover bids were then submitted by Scaleway, several other companies and even Blade CTO Jean-Baptiste Kempf along with other employees but in the end, Klaba's Jezby Ventures had the winning bid.
Once the takeover is complete, Klaba plans to keep all of Blade's existing employees with the exception of Kempf.
Blade acquisition
In a recent tweet announcing Jezby Ventures' Blade acquisition, Klaba explained that the investment fund aims to “build the best Cloud Gaming offer in the world!” going forward.
In its bid to the Paris Commercial Court, the company explained that it plans to buy all of the servers that Blade has not yet paid for and then sell them to OVHcloud. The web hosting company will then rent the servers back to Blade.
Earlier this year, Jezby Ventures also acquired the cloud storage service hubiC from OVHcloud after it was discontinued in 2018. The investment firm plans to use Blade's streaming service to help it run hubiC. Blade will also continue to offer its Shadow cloud gaming service to consumers but down the line, Jezby Ventures wants to extend its business further to provide remote desktop services.
As cloud gaming has grown in popularity over the past few years, Jezby Ventures' acquisition of Blade makes sense but Shadow's full Windows 10 instances could end up being much more profitable for the company in the long run.
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Via TechCrunch
