Blade is a cloud computing specialist and Next40 member best known for Shadow, its online gaming service. Shadow is described as a high-quality online gaming service with around 70,000 subscribers worldwide. On October 28, 2019, Blade completed a €33.5m capital increase to finance rapid development, attracting historic shareholders and new investors. As part of the operation, 2CRSi took a €2m equity stake through conversion of debt, reinforcing a special partnership between the companies. New CEO Jérôme Arnaud said the raise provides solid visibility to accelerate development and launch new offerings in France and abroad under the new management. The company also highlights commercial ties with OVHCloud and intends to leverage its technological infrastructure performance as a decisive asset for its growth. Blade operates Shadow, a cloud PC service that lets users run high-end Windows 10 games on ordinary devices like older PCs, smart TVs, laptops, Macs, tablets, and smartphones. The service targets low-latency, high‑quality experiences (up to 4K) and requires roughly 15 Mbps for a stable connection. Blade says it can capture and compress 4K images in under three milliseconds by capturing frames inside the graphics chip. The company launched Shadow in France in November 2017 and completed a soft launch in California to validate platform and data-center infrastructure. Blade plans to roll out new services, hire talent in the U.S. and Europe, and expand through partnerships with game studios (Ubisoft Nadeo) and esports organizations (Team Envy). The company has indicated a $35/month pricing target as an alternative to buying an expensive gaming PC.

Total raised

$33M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Oct 2019