Medal

Medal, also known as Medal.tv, operates a game capture and sharing platform for PC and mobile. Its desktop client runs in the background and lets a user save what just happened in any PC game with a single hotkey (F8 by default), producing a clip of a configurable length — the previous 15 or 30 seconds, one minute, five or ten minutes, or a full session — that can be trimmed and edited in-app and shared through an instantly generated link. The client supports screen capture and screenshots as well as gameplay, separate audio tracks for game, desktop (for example Discord) and microphone sources, customizable hotkeys, and an editor for adding sound effects, music, captions and montages. Clips and screenshots are stored in one place, can be set public, private or unlisted, and sync to Medal's iOS and Android apps; mobile game capture is available on Android and described as coming to iOS. The service layers social features on top of capture, including comments, likes, friend tagging, per-game feeds and follower counts, and optional quests that reward in-game items.

Medal's site states the client works on any Windows 10 or later PC, supports any PC game including Roblox, Minecraft, League of Legends, Fortnite, GTA, Battlefield, Call of Duty and Valorant as well as indie titles, and offers automatic event detection in games such as Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Apex Legends and Counter-Strike.

In July 2024 Medal expanded beyond gaming with Highlight, a cross-platform desktop application for Mac and Windows that acts as a contextual AI assistant. Highlight sits as a floating desktop button; hovering over it captures on-screen content and passes it as context to large language models, with users able to route questions to tools including ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity. Documents and system audio can also be supplied as context, and the company said it is building its own assistant that could eventually run locally, plus a local transcription app for meetings. Medal described Highlight as an open platform on which outside developers can deploy their own apps, and said it would continue to support and add features to Medal.tv while assigning some staff to Highlight.

Founding story

According to press coverage of the 2024 financing, Medal was started by game developers who were trying to draw attention to a game they had built, and the clipping product grew from that effort into a platform used by millions of gamers. Co-founder Pim de Witte said the company began considering in 2023 how to combine Medal.tv's clip-capture technology with AI, aiming to build an open platform connecting users with assistants, models and interfaces, and an AI app usable by people of any age or level of technical familiarity.

Business model

Medal distributes its PC and mobile clipping app for free and monetizes through optional paid features. Medal Premium adds unlimited cloud storage, longer clip uploads, custom sounds and ad-free use; the free tier includes unlimited uploads and in-app editing. The app also surfaces optional quests that reward users with in-game items. For the Highlight desktop AI product, the company said Highlight is free at launch and that it intends to monetize via an app-store model for third-party apps, alongside an exploratory premium subscription covering Medal's own apps and features such as local-first models.

Freemium consumer software. The core clipping app is free; revenue comes from the Medal Premium subscription (unlimited cloud storage, longer clip uploads, custom sounds, no ads) and, on the Highlight side, a planned app-store model and possible premium subscription for the company's own apps and local-first model features.

Traction

Medal's website reports 2,989,378,366 clips uploaded and 12 million+ friends connected, and its about page states over 12 million people use Medal and more than 3 billion clips have been captured. Game communities on the platform show large follower bases, including 18 million for Valorant, 14 million for Roblox, 12 million for GTA V, 10 million for Fortnite and 5.6 million for Minecraft. The 2024 financing valued the company at $333 million post-money.

Latest developments

In July 2024 Medal announced a $13 million round at a $333 million post-money valuation from Horizons Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Peak6 and Arcadia Investment Partners, and simultaneously launched Highlight, its contextual AI desktop assistant and developer platform. The company said it would keep investing in Medal.tv while dedicating part of its staff to Highlight, and is offering developer grants of up to $30,000 to build apps on the Highlight platform.