Powder and the EIC Accelerator: AI Gaming Clips That Shut Down
Gamers and streamers record hours of play, and finding the few seconds worth sharing takes time. Powder, the app of the Paris company Unique Entertainment Experience, used AI to watch gameplay and streams, pick out the highlights automatically and turn them into clips ready for social media.
The European Innovation Council granted €2,500,000 towards a €9.75 million project, and by January 2023 the app was producing 2 million AI-generated clips a month. In 2025 the team told users that "we can no longer sustain the app", and on 1 October 2025 a French court opened the company's judicial liquidation, dating its insolvency to 4 September 2025, according to the official BODACC notices.
Company file
- Legal entity
- Unique Entertainment Experience SAS, SIREN 841323819, Paris
- Registered
- July 2018
- Product
- Powder, AI clipping app for gamers and streamers
- IP
- US patent application on anonymous emotion detection from faces
- Accounts 2024
- Revenue €2.89M; net result €1.21M
- Status
- Judicial liquidation since October 2025; app shut down
- EIC project
- POWDER, 1 Aug 2022 to 31 Jul 2024, closed
- EIC funding
- Blended finance
What Happened to Powder
The powder.gg domain now redirects to a farewell letter: "After 7 incredible years together, our journey with Powder has reached its end. We've stretched our financial capacities as far as possible, but we can no longer sustain the app." It says the app will no longer be updated, subscriptions were cancelled and yearly subscribers would be refunded "wherever possible". The company's filed 2024 accounts, in the French register data, show revenue of €2.89 million and a net result of €1.21 million.
The Technology: Finding the Highlight
According to the CORDIS report, Powder built "a robust AI model: capable of recognizing and classifying over 80 video games with an accuracy exceeding 90%", extracting 17 highlights from a two-hour stream in under 10 minutes. The team published three peer-reviewed papers on clip classification and audio-visual learning in 2022 and 2023, and holds a US patent filing, US20220189076A1, on detecting emotion anonymously from facial expressions.
"We've stretched our financial capacities as far as possible, but we can no longer sustain the app."
The Powder team, farewell letter, 2025What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows
The EIC project
The EU paid 26% of a €9.75M project
POWDER ran from August 2022 to July 2024. The award was blended finance.
CORDIS project 190156232. Values in € millions.
POWDER promised a "turnkey solution for content creation, editing and sharing" with AI that generates highlights "from any gaming source". CORDIS reports the model, 2 million clips a month from January 2023 and user stickiness rising from 10% to 27%. It also says the company would need about €40 million more for research, infrastructure, marketing, international expansion and operations.
The traction
User stickiness during the project
Share of users returning, as reported by the company on CORDIS, before and after the AI improvements.
CORDIS project 190156232 results.
- An AI highlight engineDelivered80+ games, 90%+ accuracy.
- A product used at scaleDelivered2M clips a month.
- The next funding roundMissed€40M need; none raised.
- A company that continuesMissedLiquidation, 2025.
What Has Happened Since the Award
The record
From millions of gaming clips to shutdown
Powder's AI clipped millions of gaming highlights a month during the EIC project, but no further round was announced and the company was liquidated in 2025.
- Jul 2018Company registeredUnique Entertainment Experience SAS, Paris
- Oct 2021EIC Accelerator cut-offPOWDER: the camera of the metaverse
- Aug 2022EIC project startsAI highlight detection across video games€2.50M grant
- Jan 2023Scale2 million AI-generated clips a month
- Jul 2024EIC project endsNeeds about €40M more, per its report
- Sep 2025Payments stopInsolvency date set by the court
- 2025App shut downFarewell letter; subscriptions cancelled
- Oct 2025LiquidationJudicial liquidation openedInsolvent
CORDIS, BODACC and Powder's shutdown notice.
The Money
The award was blended finance; we found no EIC Fund investment. The EU paid about a quarter of the project budget. The €40 million the company said it needed after the project was never announced as raised, and a year after the project ended it stopped paying its debts.
The funding gap
The €40M the company said it still needed
Planned use of about €40M of further capital listed in the final EIC project report. No such round was announced.
CORDIS project 190156232 results. Values in € millions.
What cannot be checked
How many paying subscribers Powder had, what its 2024 revenue consisted of, whether the EIC took equity, and what creditors and subscribers will recover are not public.
Why Europe Should Care
Powder was a European consumer AI app with real usage which, by its own report, needed €40 million more to grow. The EIC grant helped build the technology, but no raise of the capital it said it needed was announced, and its users lost the service.
What the project promised
A turnkey AI tool that automatically turns any gaming source into shareable highlights.
What the record shows
A working app with millions of clips a month, then shutdown and liquidation in 2025.
The Verdict
The product worked; the business did not
Powder delivered what the EIC funded: an AI that clipped gaming highlights at scale and kept users coming back. By its own report it then needed about €40 million more, and no raise was announced before it shut down. The EIC money built a product that no longer exists.
Unique Entertainment Experience could not be asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on EU project data, French official notices and the company's farewell letter, linked throughout.
Industry
Digital and computingDigital media
- Focus
- Video software
- Technologies
- Artificial intelligence
- Computer vision
- Keywords
- Video games
- Live streaming
- Content creators
- Social media
- Highlight clipping