Born from Shinra's ashes, interactive streaming startup Genvid raises $1.5M

Earlier this year New York-based Genvid Technologies made its public debut, and now VentureBeat reports the company has raised $1.5 million from investors as it seeks to build a platform for delivering interactive broadcasts of people playing video games.

Genvid's tech is explicitly aimed at game developers: in an earlier interview with VentureBeat, founder and CEO Jacob Navok said that "we are building tools that allow developers to create many cameras in their arena" and manipulate the video captured from those cameras in an effort to make live broadcasts of people playing video games more engaging.

That includes pulling in live-streaming video to put together highlight reels on the fly, or flipping between cameras in a match based on where the action is happening, but Genvid aims to go further: it says it wants to help devs integrate interactive camera systems for livestream viewers into their game's design.

"If you want to find out what weapon a player is using, you could click on the stream,” Navok told VentureBeat. “If you want to see a combo someone is using in Street Fighter or what cards someone is using in Hearthstone, you can click on the stream.”

Prior to leading Genvid, Navok served as a cofounder and SVP of technology at Shinra Technologies, the New York-based cloud gaming company Square Enix launched in 2014 under the leadership of ex-Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada. Shinra was shuttered in January, and some of the folks who worked at Shinra have now come to work at Genvid, with Wada himself serving on Genvid's board of advisors.