For the video game industry, the Covid-19 epidemic has been a godsend. Most of the industry players at all ends of the chain, from console manufacturers to game publishers, have seen their revenues soar. The French Blade, on the other hand, has failed to benefit from this worldwide craze for video game services. Worse, the company, which offers gamers virtual computers – by leasing remote servers through its Shadow service – was placed in receivership in March.
On Friday April 30, the Paris Commercial Court entrusted the takeover of the company to hubiC, a file storage and sharing service, owned by Octave Klaba, founder of the European cloud leader OVH.
Founded in 2015, Blade was nevertheless one of France’s leading start-ups. She who had raised more than 100 million euros, was still, in 2020, in the Next 40 index, which lists the most promising young French shoots. But with crippled finances and insufficient income, Blade found itself at a standstill. Without being able to finance more servers to accommodate more customers, the company was forced to refuse new users.
Increase the rate
When the recovery was announced, several candidates presented themselves: hubiC, therefore, but also Scaleway, a subsidiary of Illiad (whose founder, Xavier Niel, is an individual shareholder of the World). Finding these offers insufficient, employees of Blade had presented their own offer before bringing it closer to that of Scaleway. Their project: to quickly achieve profitability by increasing the tariff for accessing Blade’s service and by diversifying the company’s offers, in particular for businesses. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, at the head of the initiative of the employees of Blade, did not hide, Friday, his disappointment, while estimating that this action made it possible to see the birth of projects “Better for the business”.
According to figures published by Octave Klaba at the time of the announcement of its takeover plan, Blade Shadow saw its number of users increase to 97,000 in 2020 (compared to 67,000 in 2019), but its consolidated turnover has decreased to 17 million euros (compared to 20 million in 2019). The financing requirement identified was 30 million to 35 million euros.