Perry's Gaikai service raises $5 million VC

Big Dave Perry's Gaikai game service has raised $5 million in venture capital funding, according to a US SEC filing uncovered by Gamasutra.

According to the doc, Mitch Lasky, a former Activision exec and current partner at tech-investment firm Benchmark Capital, is a contributor.

Formed by Perry along with Andrew Gault and Rui Pereira, Gaikai is similar to OnLive, allowing users to play high-graphic games by rendering images on the server before being compressed into streaming format and loaded onto gaming systems.

Gaikai is slated for Q1 2010 launch after closed beta, which Perry told VG247 at Develop last year already had 20,000 people signed up without a single dollar spent on marketing.

“I already have enough players for closed beta," he told us. "What we’re actually going to do is set up the servers in California and we’re going to keep delivering players until we cripple the servers. Then we’re going to make some configuration changes when we see the data, then we’re going to invite more players.”

Once the "final server configuration" is achieved, it'll "launch across the US".