David Lee

In 2003, David Lee climbed to the rooftop of the University of Hong Kong's main building and started a company. His early clients were HKU's own departments. The product, EditGrid, was an Ajax-powered collaborative spreadsheet built before "collaborative software" was a category. Google Sheets didn't exist yet. Neither did the iPhone.

Five years later, Apple bought the company - not for the product, but for the team. The technology that EditGrid pioneered became the foundation for iWork.com, and Lee became a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple, leading a 30-person team through the years when cloud collaboration went from novelty to necessity.

He stayed for eight years. That's a long time at a company that moves fast and expects you to be inside the machine. By 2017, he had built enough institutional knowledge and enough restlessness to walk away. He co-founded NEX Team Inc. with Reggie Chan and Tony Sung, setting up shop in San Jose with a dual headquarters in Hong Kong - proximity to chip designers in Silicon Valley, proximity to hardware partners near Shenzhen.

The early product was HomeCourt, a basketball training app that used computer vision to track shots, measure arc, and give feedback without a coach in the room. It found a real audience. Steve Nash invested. Jeremy Lin invested. Mark Cuban invested. These were not vanity checks - they were athletes and sports executives who recognized something genuine in the technology.

Then came Active Arcade in 2021, a mobile app for motion-tracking games. Then the Series B, $25 million led by Blue Pool Capital, with Samsung Ventures joining and a celebrity co-investor list that read like a pop culture bracket: Simu Liu (Shang-Chi), Thierry Henry (Arsenal legend), Sabrina Ionescu (WNBA), plus executives from YouTube, Uber, MasterClass, and Facebook.

The NBA had invested in the Series A alongside Will Smith's Dreamers Fund and Alibaba's Entrepreneurship Fund. By the time Nex Playground launched in December 2023, Lee had assembled an investor base that was part sports, part entertainment, part tech - which made sense, because that's exactly what the product is.

Nex Playground is a palm-sized console that retails for $179. It has a built-in motion-tracking camera. It works with up to four players simultaneously. It supports licensed characters: Peppa Pig, Sesame Street, How to Train Your Dragon. It pairs with Sony BRAVIA TVs via their camera system. It pairs with Apple TV through Continuity Camera. You don't need a separate sensor bar or a special controller. You use your body.

Lee designed it specifically for kids who have never held a gaming controller - that early-childhood audience that Nintendo's Wii briefly captured and then lost when the novelty of flinging your arm wore off and the game library didn't keep up. His explicit goal is to avoid that trap: sustainable economics, continuous content, family engagement over repeat purchase spikes.

In 2025, Nex Playground sold more than 600,000 units - a 4x jump from the previous year. It was on Black Friday gift lists. It was in Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon simultaneously, over 5,000 stores in all. Fast Company named Nex one of the Most Innovative Gaming Companies of 2026. TIME put it on the 100 Most Influential Companies list.

Lee grew up in Sham Shui Po, one of Hong Kong's most densely populated working-class neighborhoods. The gap between that starting point and a TIME's 100 list is not nothing. It's two exits - one to Apple, one still in progress - built on the belief that how children play is worth engineering at the hardware level.

The aspiration is simple and large in equal measure: "We want a Nex Playground in every living room." Whether that's a startup vision or a company mission depends on whether you're watching from the outside or building from within. Lee is building from within.