In late 2014, Stu Grubbs was on his last dime as he tried to get Infiniscene off the ground.

The Chicago entrepreneur and his team of gaming industry veterans came up with the idea to simplify the process of live streaming your video game experience, and set out to help grow the number of broadcasters in an industry that was exploding with content watchers.

Infiniscene aimed to tackle the complicated process of launching a stream and creating a following on Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and other streaming sites, and in 2015 Grubbs spent his last couple hundred dollars on a flight to CES to hustle his prototype around the showroom floor.

"This time last year I was going to lose my apartment for putting my last dollars into Infiniscene," Grubbs said. "It really came down to the wire for us."

Infiniscene gained some nice traction at CES, but no investment dollars. It wasn't until Grubbs met Techstars Managing Director Troy Henikoff--who encouraged the company to apply for the sought-after accelerator program--that things started to really ramp up.

In Techstars, Infiniscene continued building out its product, made connections in the gaming industry, and grew its user base during its private beta test. The company has since raised $1.8 million, hired its 11th employee, and is poised to take a piece of the massive gaming industry.

"What we were trying to do was considered technically infeasible last year, at least in late 2014," Grubbs said. "Technology has sort of been advancing as we’ve built our product, enabling us to do some cool stuff."

If you're not familiar with live streaming video game sites, here's a primer: Gamers use platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming to broadcast their video game experience and interact with followers. And if you're wondering, who would want to watch someone else play a video game, get used to it. Twitch sold to Amazon in 2014 for more than $1 billion, and Twitch sees more than 100 million monthly unique viewers.

But while viewership soars, the number of game broadcasters hasn't risen as fast, which Grubbs attributes to the arduous and complex process of setting up your own live stream.

"It's amazing to me that you’ve seen Twitch triple in viewership--I think it's somewhere over 155 million monthly viewers--but the number of broadcasters in that time has grown from 1.1 million to 1.7 million," he said. "It's largely do to the fact that even if you do get up and running a stream, you probably haven't configured everything correctly."

Broadcasters currently have to deal with complicated configurations, setting things like bitrates, codecs and stream keys to produce a high quality stream.

There's a considerable amount of know-how involved in setting up a stream, Grubbs said, which prevents novices and more casual players from becoming broadcasters. Infiniscene helps someone with no experience or technical knowledge start streaming in a matter of minutes.

Gamers just log in through Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Hitbox, or Azubu, download and install the Infiniscene app, pair it with their account, and they're ready to stream. Infiniscene puts the broadcast studio in the cloud, and sets things like bitrates and codecs for you.

"We put every viewer a few clicks away from exploring the idea of being a broadcaster," Grubbs said.

Infiniscene is planning to launch its open beta in April and continue to improve the product before officially going live. Grubbs noted that while Infiniscene gained a wave of users after Techstars, the startup's momentum hasn't slowed. Signups have increased 50% month-over-month since December, and interest in the service continues to grow, Grubbs said. Eventually, the plan is to partner with Twitch and YouTube Gaming to launch as "how-to" guides for beginning broadcasters, and also build products to support more advanced gamers.

"A lot of people are surprised when you say, 'Twitch has this many people watch other people play video games.' And in actuality, this is not new behavior," Grubbs said. "Reality TV has dominated the ratings since it first came out in the '90s. And the difference is these people, meaning these streamers who want to share their gaming experiences or their lives, are more relatable and often times better human beings who you actually want to know and hang out with.

"It's less about watching someone play video games as it is hanging out with friends."