You are more than just a username

The slogan alone hints at the concept behind it. Founded in Chemnitz in 2020, reignite has managed to win over 150,000 users for its platform in a remarkably short space of time. The platform lets users — primarily in gaming — personalise their player profiles for popular titles such as League of Legends, Valorant, Fortnite and many more, and display them as digital cards. And it is not just game statistics that can be visualised, but interests and hobbies too. In this interview, Johannes Herbig, CEO and co-founder of reignite, talks about how they arrived at their founding idea and why they chose beel.

How did you come up with the idea for reignite?

Johannes Herbig, CEO & Co-Founder of reignite: "We live and breathe gaming, so we know the emotional highs and lows that come with playing passionately. One of the big problems that leads to frustration is that online games offer no efficient way to find the right people to play with. In multiplayer games especially, people pour a huge amount of time and effort into manually searching for new teammates in forums, Facebook groups, WhatsApp chats and similar places — often with little or no success. Many people have had bad experiences with random teammates and end up avoiding multiplayer altogether.

Matchmaking in games usually only looks at hard in-game factors like rank, ratios and games played, and groups random players together on that basis. Age, language, communication skills, personal goals such as being competitive or simply wanting to have fun and unwind after work — none of that is taken into account.

With reignite, we want to build a network for every multiplayer gamer in the world. We believe multiplayer titles should always be fun, and that means being surrounded by people who bring out the best in each other. Our platform makes it quick and easy to find people who not only share your play style but also fit you as a person. Beyond that, it acts as a social aggregator for individuals and smaller groups alike."

How does the reignite platform work?

JH: "At the heart of the reignite platform is the personality profile — what we call a player's Gamer Identity. It is made up of a whole range of factors: communication, humour, temperament, strategy, teamplay, age, gender, location, biography, interests, games, languages, intentions, habits, hardware (consoles, controllers, headsets and so on) and an avatar image.

A matching algorithm brings players together who might otherwise never have crossed paths. Because the focus is on the person rather than the title, we can offer matchmaking for any game — PC, PlayStation, Xbox or Switch, it makes no difference. The system rates and sorts search results by quality, and users can filter them further by their own preferences."

Left to right: Christoph Schulze, Joshua Kirrbach, Johannes Herbig. Source: reignite

How did you hear about beel?

JH: "At a pitching event in Mittweida, I was lucky enough to meet Christoph Jentzsch. In a very short conversation, he laid out the potential of tokenising shares in a GmbH and how fundamentally that can change the way companies raise capital — not least because, for a long time, the right framework for it simply did not exist."

Is reignite heading into Web3?

JH: "Starting from gaming, reignite wants to build a natural bridge into the Web3 world and open up new use cases for blockchain technology. That is exactly why it was a given for us that we had to try this new investment tool from beel straight away. We were also convinced by the standardised set of contracts beel provides: it is a solid basis for settling company financing faster, both for us as a founding team and for our investors."

Gamer profile in the app. Source: reignite GmbH

How did beel support you in issuing your own company token?

JH: "You cannot get by entirely without some understanding of cryptocurrencies and wallets. But beel guides you through it well, and issuing your own GmbH token on the Ethereum blockchain turns out to be possible without any major hurdles. A few months ago, as a crypto newcomer, I would have found that idea almost unthinkable."

How did you bring your investors on board?

JH: "I set up a beel account in a matter of minutes and created a Private Offer tailored to the individual investor. I sent each investor a link by email pointing to their specific offer. The investor accepted it and could invest right away.

We were free to choose the payment method ourselves. We went with a classic SEPA bank transfer, and once the capital had landed in our company account, we confirmed it directly in our beel account and the investor received their tokens in their wallet in return.

But it was not just the low-cost, fast and simple investment process that won us over — it was also the long-term possibilities a token opens up. In future, for example, we could handle employee participation via tokens, or use them to incentivise our gamer community."

What will you use the new capital for?

JH: "The company is on an exponential growth path. We are already at 150,000 users on the platform. We plan to use the funding to scale the business further and to grow the team, currently six people, in order to speed up the platform's technical development."

Discover reignite at https://www.reignite.gg/

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