OUR STORY

A team for immersive experiences

Fergus Leleu

CEO

Publicis, F-Secure, Shadow

J-B Kempf

CTO

FFmpeg, VLC player, Shadow, Ubisoft & EA Games as consultant

Yannis Weinbach

CPO

Key AAA gaming publishers as consultant, Shadow

Our story

As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day... But as they also say, time flies when you’re having fun.

Cloud based from day one

For a while, we all worked for the same startup: Shadow, a gem in the uprising cloud PC empire. An incredible project, that could have closed down in 2021... This is when we banded together with three other colleagues, to try to buy our company. We ended up raising €35M in just a month, against all odds. We even had help from Illiad’s Xavier Niel - but another offer was made by Octave Klaba (OVH). After a decade of serving publishers and working on world-renowned cloud gaming and computing projects, we decided it was time to carve our own path.

Another café please

There was an idea: use what we had learned on streaming tech and the gaming industry, to come up with a solution to make game testing much easier than it is today. You would’t even need to install anything, and still get a premium experience of the game. So, we worked for months to get all the ingredients right. Challenging the limits of our VLC based tech. Streaming demos in 4K and 120p (just in case). Running hundreds of times trough the same level of -- oh wait, we can’t say the name of that game. Anyway, you get the idea: after about 100.000 gallons of expressos, we finally saw our efforts rewarded.

Jumping in

So, in May 2024, Playruo was launched. A fully browser-based way to test games instantly, in the best possible quality (thanks, JB). Why the name? “Ruo” is latin for "jump into". Playruo literally expresses the idea of that first jump that immerses you in a game, that initial boost that keeps you wanting more. You guessed it, our mission is to enable games to find their audience, and gamers to discover the games they'll love. As gamers ourselves and industry professionals, we've always dreamed of a solution like Playruo. Today it’s real at last, and we’re thrilled to work with a bunch of amazing clients already. Give it a try!

Investors

Guess what? We're in stealth mode on the fundraising front, which means you've got a VIP backstage pass to chat with us. Send us a message and let's cook up something together!

Ready for the ride?

You can count on us like you count on your coffee machine to work every morning. Efficiency is our middle name, right after "Pragmatic" and before "Why is the Wi-Fi down again". If you're looking for a team with crazy ideas, you've found your tribe.