CiiNOW

CiiNOW, Inc. operated as a B2B technology provider in the cloud gaming sector, offering a turnkey platform for service providers, retailers, and game publishers. The company was founded in August 2010 by CEO Ron Haberman, CTO Makarand Dharmapurikar, and VP of Engineering Devendra Raut. Haberman brought over two decades of experience in business strategy and software from roles at major corporations like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia.

The company's core offering was the 'Cumulus' platform, a white-label solution engineered to deliver a high-quality, low-latency gaming experience across a multitude of devices, including PCs, Macs, tablets, Smart TVs, and mobile phones, without requiring powerful local hardware. CiiNOW's business model focused on being a pure technology enabler, partnering with companies like cable operators and telcos that already had established billing relationships with millions of customers, thereby avoiding the significant customer acquisition costs that burdened competitors like OnLive. Revenue was to be generated by empowering these partners to launch their own branded cloud gaming services.

CiiNOW secured $13 million in a Series A funding round in December 2011, with backing from prominent investors including Foundation Capital, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, and AMD Ventures. This capital was intended to expand engineering teams and partnership development. The company publicly announced its hybrid-streaming platform in 2012 and proceeded to establish partnerships with content distributors like Plug In Digital and service providers in the US, South Korea, and France. The platform's technical architecture was designed to be flexible, running on virtualized data centers and combining server-side and client-side processing to optimize performance. In 2014, in what appears to have been an acqui-hire, Google was assigned CiiNOW's patent portfolio, and key employees, including co-founder Devendra Raut, joined Google.

Keywords: cloud gaming technology, B2B gaming platform, Cumulus platform, game streaming, white-label gaming, Ron Haberman, Makarand Dharmapurikar, Devendra Raut, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, Foundation Capital, AMD Ventures, virtualized gaming, cross-platform gaming, remote rendering, low-latency streaming, digital game distribution, Google acquisition, acqui-hire, patent acquisition, game-on-demand