Cloud Gaming Tech Firm Well-Link Secures $40M in Round-B2 Financing

Well-Link, a Chinese cloud gaming services provider, announced on September 26 that it has completed a B2 round of financing totaling $40 million yuan, led by Temasek and followed by previous shareholders including Future Capital and CDH VGC. China Renaissance and Fanzhuo Capital jointly acted as financial advisers.

Founded in 2019, Well-Link has now completed five rounds of financing in just three years. Its investors include Shunwei Capital, Dunhong Capital, Xiaomi, game developer miHoYo and CMGE, and cloud services provider Kingsoft Cloud.

According to a report on China’s game industry in the first half of 2022 released by the Game Industry Committee of the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association in July, domestic mobile game users now total 650 million, while mobile games’ sales revenue accounts for 74.75% of total game market revenue. The PC games market size only accounted for 20.80% overall. The development of cloud gaming is expected to allow more mobile game users to experience the fun of console games through mobile devices.

Guo Jianjun, the founder and CEO of Well-Link, said that the number of mobile game users in China is several times the number of PC game users. Cloud games provide convenience for mobile game users, allowing them to experience top games on more smart devices. Well-Link’s revenue has grown more than 400% for two consecutive years and is expected to reach hundreds of millions of yuan in 2022. On top of this, the team will optimize cloud rendering and delivery costs, which will further reduce the premium price of cloud games in the future.

While serving game manufacturers and players, Well-Link has gradually realized that the era of Graphics as a Service (GaaS) had arrived. After completing the last round of financing at the end of 2021, on the basis of its advantages in the cloud game sector, Well-Link began to expand its business in key areas such as virtual world exclusive servers, cloud-based rendering digital human development platforms and next-generation software, or “Ark Architecture.”

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At the hardware server level, Well-Link customizes ultra-high density GPU servers according to new rendering modes and software architecture, thereby reducing costs and improving processing efficiency. In August this year, as a representative work based on “Ark Architecture,” China’s first movie-grade cloud native game, “The Grass of Genesis,” was officially released.

A fusion of games and movies, the most important aspect of The Grass of Genesis is that it allows users to enter a virtual world from the perspective of God, with a strong sense of immersion. In the future, Well-Link will integrate all technical capabilities into a set of cloud developer operating systems based on the The Grass of Genesis, with a large number of tools, engines and methodologies.

Well-Link has reached strategic cooperation with Haixi Media to jointly promote the debut of a digital human based on the game as a digital actor. While building the application standards of digital human technology, the firm will also launch a tool chain for content production to help creators complete the production of digital humans and metaverse activity scenes.