Cloud Gaming Service Gaikai Raises $5M

Gaikai, the cloud processing-based streaming game service co-founded by Shiny founder and former Acclaim creative director Dave Perry, has raised $5 million in venture capital funding, according to a U.S. SEC filing submitted this week. The company has not yet commented in detail on the funding, although a Gaikai representative did acknowledge it to Gamasutra. Mitch Lasky, a general partner at tech-focused investment firm Benchmark Capital, was listed on the SEC form, suggesting Benchmark's involvement. Lasky himself is a veteran of the game industry, as a founder of mobile gaming company Jamdat and a one-time Activision executive. Formed by Perry along with Andrew Gault and Rui Pereira, and announced last year, Gaikai is a competitor to similar service OnLive, which was unveiled slightly earlier. Both companies hope to market technology that will allow users to play graphically-intensive video games without the need for highly capable processing hardware, by rendering game images on the server side then compressing and streaming then to users' devices.