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.

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.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

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.

1. An AI highlight engineDelivered80+ games, 90%+ accuracy.
2. A product used at scaleDelivered2M clips a month.
3. The next funding roundMissed€40M need; none raised.
4. A company that continuesMissedLiquidation, 2025.

What Has Happened Since the Award

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.

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 the company could not raise the capital it said it needed, and its users lost the service.

The Verdict

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.