Medal’s new CEO is all-in on gaming.
Founded in 2018, Medal’s primary focus is clipping. While playing on their computers, gamers can run Medal’s software in the background, using it to automatically detect, save, edit and share short clips of exciting gameplay moments. Last month, Medal’s sister company General Intuition announced a $133.7 million fundraise to build AI models for three-dimensional spaces — both in gaming and in the physical world — using data mined from Medal’s wealth of gaming clips. As part of the announcement, Medal’s founder and former CEO Pim de Witte made the jump over to the new venture as its chief executive officer.
As Medal moves ahead into a new era influenced by its relationship with General Intuition, the company has appointed Ken Colton as its new CEO. Colton has worked at Medal for four years, most recently as its chief technology officer and president — and he is also a deeply passionate gamer and clipper in his own right.
“I get up at 6 a.m. every day, not so I can take an ice bath or do yoga, but so that I can play games,” Colton said in an interview with GamesBeat. “I like to get up and do something that is immediately fun and gratifying. It’s really important for me, not just from a professional level — I need this.”
To learn more about the new Medal CEO’s vision for his company and the clipping space at large, GamesBeat sat down with Colton for an annotated Q&A.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
On Medal’s roots in gaming
Ken Colton:
“In some ways, I’m almost taking us back to our roots a little bit. I go back and look at some of the early ideas of trying to connect friends around their gaming moments, and being really friend-oriented resonates with me. That’s what I personally use Medal for, and that’s the kind of stuff that I want to expand on, where it’s focusing on making it so people can share with their friends and discover new games really easily — and a little bit less on the, ‘this is for content creators trying to get famous.’”
GamesBeat:
In his interview with GamesBeat, Colton drew a clear boundary between his company’s gaming-oriented product and the broader marketing phenomenon of clipping — wherein creators and brands pay multitudes of faceless accounts to spam their short-form videos across platforms — that has arisen over the past year. Although advertising is one of Medal’s revenue streams, Colton’s answer demonstrates how the company is approaching its product as more of a social media tool than a typical media or marketing play.
On Medal’s relationship with General Intuition
Ken Colton:
“What’s great is we have perfectly aligned objectives. The world of AI needs more and more data, and we’re seeing the more you have, the better things that you can make. What I want to do with Medal is grow it to being the next must-have app on every single gaming computer — and that means that we’ll have more data than anyone else. The way that things work together is just that Medal needs to grow — that’s our main objective, the main objective handed over to us from them. Just grow, and that’s what I want to do, anyway.”
GamesBeat:
Colton’s answer shows how Medal and General Intuition are technically separate, but deeply intertwined as General Intuition builds out its models using Medal’s reams of gaming data. Although Medal has raised tens of millions of dollars in funding over the years, General Intuition’s recently announced $133.7 million fundraise blows Medal’s funding out of the water, highlighting investors’ strong appetite for opportunities in the AI space. By saying that General Intuition had “handed over” a main objective to Medal, Colton acknowledged his company’s key role in making investors’ dreams in General Intuition into a success.
On Medal’s current business model
Ken Colton:
“It is ads and subscriptions. And I know ads are a tough thing to have, but we’re trying to do it in a way that is as pain-free and positive as possible. I like discovering new games; I would love, at some point, for most of the ads on Medal to be about new games. But yeah — ads are the main revenue driver, as well as a little bit from subscriptions.
I have learned from the first year and a half so far that it is very difficult to grow subscriptions, and it is not yet in people’s mind to be thinking about paying for something to take clips of their gameplay. So, I do want that to grow, but it would never be at the expense of the core user.”
GamesBeat:
Whether through ads or subscriptions, Medal’s business model appears to be working. The company is profitable, according to de Witte, who spoke to GamesBeat at GamesBeat Next 2025 last week. With this in mind, Colton’s hesitance to adjust the revenue dials too much makes sense.
Medal’s advertising products are making a significant impact for clients like the game “Yapyap,” which partnered with Medal earlier this year for a marketing campaign ahead of its full launch later in the year. This took the form of an in-app quest that prompted users to wishlist the game and post clips of themselves playing its free demo, with the first 3,000 users to do so earning a free key to the full game upon its release. In the four days it took to hand out all of the keys, “Yapyap” gained over 100,000 wishlists and 300,000 new demo players, driving 81,500 total clips of “Yapyap” to Medal, according to numbers shared by a company representative.
On his personal favorite gaming clip
Ken Colton:
“It comes from our group here. We do game nights every now and then, and we play ‘Peak.’ My favorite clip is one where one of the people that we’re playing with falls off, and then they hit every single bomb plant on the way down. It’s just them screaming and laughing the whole time while the rest of the company is watching them go through that.”