Playruo has raised €2.1 million in funding, aiming to establish itself as the leading platform for testing and sharing video games via streaming. Backed by investors including Kameha Ventures and the Blast Club, the company has also announced a strategic partnership with PulluP.
Playruo, a cloud gaming solution for video game studios and publishers, has announced that it has completed a €2.1 million funding round. Led by the investment funds Kameha Ventures and Blast Club as well as Ventech, Maxime Demeure, and Nicolas Beraud, this new funding round will accelerate the commercialisation of Playruo's services, which include instant gameplay testing, QA and product approval, previews and reviews for the press, marketing operations specific to game streamers, secure sharing of builds between studios, publishers and investors, and playable demos accessible without downloading from ads and web pages. This funding round therefore marks Playruo's transition from a market validation phase to an international business expansion phase.
Publishers and studios can leverage this technology at every stage of a game's lifecycle. This includes facilitating playtests and QA during development, arranging press and influencer previews ahead of launch, and boosting engagement with playable ads at launch. Playruo has developed proprietary technology that streams games directly to the browser. This enables players to try out a video game on any device with just one click.
In addition, the Playruo team has announced a strategic partnership with PulluP Entertainment, which is due to take effect this year. Playruo will provide its playtesting, QA and press preview tools for select titles published by Focus Entertainment and Dotemu. These tools will streamline the testing phases of games, from pre-production to production, and gather user feedback while protecting shared content. Playruo's client case studies include organisations such as the SNJV (the French national syndicate for video games) and Nacon (Hell is Us, Styx: Blades of Greed, and GreedFall 2), as well as Ubisoft and Webedia on a marketing campaign for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
"As many as 20,000 games are released every year, so it's an understatement to say that competition is fierce! With Playruo, our goal is to reduce the creative and marketing uncertainty faced by developers and publishers by making it easier to test and access games," explains Fergus Leleu, CEO of Playruo. "We want to transform every test and every time a game is shared via Playruo’s solutions into a measurable insight for industry players."
"Playruo turns games into instantly accessible experiences. This is a major shift. By removing installation and distribution friction, they enable studios to test faster, market better, and reach players globally with one click. We have followed and worked with the team for several years, and have been consistently impressed by their vision and execution," says Olivier Gemayel, Managing Partner, Kameha Ventures. "At Kameha, we strongly believe that tools like Playruo, built in gaming, will define the future of interactive content distribution across industries."
"Supporting Playruo's growth is fully in line with our strategic vision for digital entertainment. Their technological edge and the team's expertise make them a cutting-edge player, capable of addressing a major challenge for studios: optimizing and securing player conversion," says Anthony Bourbon, founder of Blast.Club. "We are proud to support them in bringing this offering to market, which is already shaping up to be an industry benchmark."
