Tagged: entertainment
30 results
IDN Media
IDN Media is Indonesia's largest youth-focused media and entertainment technology company, reaching more than 70 million millennials and Gen Z each month. Founded in 2014 by brothers Winston and William Utomo, it grew from a single news blog (IDN Times) into a multi-platform ecosystem spanning digital media, live streaming, short drama, entertainment and live experiences, and the creator economy. Its stated mission is to democratize information for a better Indonesia.
Telfaz11
Telfaz11 is a Riyadh-based creative media studio that pioneered Arabic online video in the early 2010s and has since grown into one of Saudi Arabia's leading film and content producers. Founded in 2011 by Alaa Fadan, Ali Al Kalthami and Ibraheem Alkhairallah, it began as a YouTube-first network aimed at Saudi youth and evolved into feature films, streaming originals and branded content. Its 2022 wrestling comedy 'Sattar' became the highest-grossing Saudi film ever, and the studio holds a multi-picture deal with Netflix.
Figure8
Figure8 is a New York-based, experience-first development company founded by Maryellis Bunn and Manish Vora, the team behind the Museum of Ice Cream. It designs and operates 'experiums' - large-scale immersive, multi-sensory spaces built to draw people offline and into shared, playful, in-person moments. Backed by a $40M Series A at a reported $200M valuation, Figure8 builds and scales its own experiential brands while taking on commissioned activations for outside partners.
Mass Appeal
Mass Appeal is a New York-based media and content company that calls itself the elevated voice of hip-hop. Founded as a graffiti fanzine in 1996 and revived in 2013 by rapper Nas, CEO Peter Bittenbender and the late journalist-filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, it spans a record label, film and TV production, digital series, a creative agency and direct-to-consumer commerce. The company is best known for the Hip Hop 50 initiative marking the genre's 50th anniversary, Grammy- and award-winning documentaries, and a music catalog built around legacy artists and their new work.
Meadowlark Media
Meadowlark Media is a New York and Miami based sports content studio and creator network founded in 2021 by former ESPN president John Skipper and longtime on-air host Dan Le Batard. It develops and produces premium, personality-driven sports storytelling across podcasts, radio, streaming video, and documentary film for third-party buyers such as Netflix, Apple TV+, and DraftKings. Anchored by The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz and a roster that includes Pablo Torre Finds Out and Nothing Personal with David Samson, Meadowlark blends daily audio programming with prestige documentary work like Good Rivals and The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox.
Palm Tree Crew Holdings
Palm Tree Crew is a Miami-based entertainment, hospitality and investment holding company founded by Norwegian DJ and producer Kygo (Kyrre Gorvell-Dahll) and his manager Myles Shear. Built around the globe-trotting Palm Tree Music Festival, the company spans four lines of business - live events, hospitality venues and beach clubs, a consumer lifestyle and apparel brand, and a multi-product investment platform. In September 2025 it raised a $20 million Series B led by WME Group at a $215 million valuation to fund international festival expansion, new clubs and hotels, and early-stage bets in beverages and consumer goods.
SeatGeek
SeatGeek is a New York-based ticketing company that runs a mobile-first marketplace for live sports, concerts and theater alongside an enterprise platform that powers primary ticketing for teams, leagues and venues. It is best known for Deal Score, an algorithm that rates every listing by price and seat value, and it competes with Ticketmaster and StubHub across both the primary and secondary ticket markets.
Michael Diaz
Michael Diaz is the CEO of Palm Tree Crew Holdings, the diversified lifestyle, live-events, and investment company Kygo and Myles Shear founded in 2020. A former Duke undergrad who spent his early career in investment banking at UBS and as a Managing Director at LionTree, Diaz now runs a business that in 2025 raised a $20M Series B led by WME Group at a $215M valuation, opened four Palm Tree Club hospitality venues in under a year, and expanded its festival footprint from Oahu and West Palm Beach to Saint-Tropez and Sardinia.
Peter Bittenbender
Peter Bittenbender is co-founder and CEO of Mass Appeal, the New York-based hip-hop media, label, and creative agency he relaunched in 2013 with Nas and the late Sacha Jenkins. Before Mass Appeal he co-founded Decon, the independent label and creative shop that seeded the modern hybrid label-agency model. He spent 2023 leading Hip Hop 50, then 2025's 'Legend Has It' rollout of seven classic-artist albums, and won the 2022 Billboard Indie Power Players nod along the way.
Idilio TV
Idilio TV is a Latin American microdrama streaming app that produces original vertical series with episodes roughly 90 seconds to 3 minutes long, blending the melodrama of telenovelas with the format of TikTok. Founded by Gabriela Tafur and Esteban Ramirez and legally operating as Latido TV SAS, the company uses an AI-assisted production pipeline to make short-form drama faster and cheaper than traditional studios. Available free on iOS and Android, it passed 1.3 million-plus downloads across 50-plus countries within months of launch and raised a $5.5M seed round led by a16z Speedrun with backing from Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, Goodwater Capital, Precursor Ventures and Nubank founder David Velez.
Chronicle Studios
Chronicle Studios is an AI-driven entertainment company building the growth platform for global franchises. It reverses the traditional Hollywood development model - instead of betting on a script and hoping audiences show up, its agentic AI platform finds emerging creators and IP, tests audience demand early, and automates audience discovery, distribution and monetization across social platforms. Founded in 2025 by tech entrepreneur Aaron Sisto and former DreamWorks Animation president Chris deFaria, the company raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round to back creators across animation, gaming, music, comedy and podcasts.
George Strompolos
George Strompolos is the co-founder and CEO of Promise, a Venice, California studio built from the ground up for the generative AI era to produce films and series. He co-created the YouTube Partner Program in 2007, founded the creator-economy giant Fullscreen in 2011, and sold it to AT&T/WarnerMedia in 2018 in a reported $845M deal. At Promise he is building MUSE, a production workflow platform that threads generative AI tools through the filmmaking process, backed by Peter Chernin's North Road, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google's AI Futures Fund.
Sam Pressman
Sam Pressman is the CEO of Pressman Film, the storied independent studio his father Edward R. Pressman founded in 1969 and that backed American Psycho, Wall Street, Badlands and The Crow. A Stanford Film & Media Studies graduate who grew up on his father's sets, Sam took the helm after Ed's death in 2023 and is betting that independent cinema's next chapter runs on radical filmmakers, crowd-sourced financing, virtual reality and AI - while keeping his father's motto, 'every film is a miracle,' close.
Museum of Ice Cream
Museum of Ice Cream is an immersive, multi-sensory entertainment brand that turns the simple pleasure of ice cream into a walk-through playground of color, nostalgia, and unlimited treats. Born as a 2016 New York pop-up built around a now-iconic sprinkle pool, it grew into a chain of permanent 'experiums' across the U.S. and Singapore under parent company Figure8, blending hospitality, retail, and shareable social moments into one ticketed experience.
Kari Perez
Kari Perez is Vice President of Gaming Communications at Microsoft, where she leads global PR and communications strategy for Xbox. She joined the Xbox team in March 2021 after a distinguished career spanning gaming, streaming, and entertainment — including VP-level roles at Netflix Latin America and corporate affairs at HBO Latin America. Multilingual and internationally experienced, Perez has become one of the most prominent communications voices in the gaming industry, issuing statements on major Xbox announcements ranging from Game Pass price changes to leadership speculation.
Jarret Myer
Jarret Myer is the founder and CEO of UPROXX Studios, the independent youth-culture media company he rebuilt by buying UPROXX, HipHopDX and Dime Magazine back out of Warner Music Group in 2024 alongside will.i.am and former Complex chief Rich Antoniello. Three decades earlier he co-founded Rawkus Records, the late-'90s independent label that signed Mos Def and Talib Kweli and became the home of conscious, underground hip hop. Between those bookends he built and sold Uproxx Media and launched the YouTube talent shop Big Frame, making him one of the rare operators to ship culture-defining ventures across records, web publishing and online video.
Manish Vora
Manish Vora is the co-founder and co-CEO of Museum of Ice Cream, the candy-colored immersive attraction that turned a 2016 self-funded pop-up in New York's Meatpacking District into a global chain of 'experiums' with locations across the US and Singapore. A former Citigroup investment banker turned art-and-experience entrepreneur, he previously co-founded the contemporary art platform GREY AREA and ran the experience-tech venue Lightbox before partnering with Maryellis Bunn. He now co-leads Figure8, the experience-first development company that is the parent of Museum of Ice Cream and raised a $40M Series A in 2019 at a $200M valuation.
UPROXX
UPROXX is a Los Angeles-based digital media and entertainment company that grew from a music and pop-culture website into a connected-TV and social-video powerhouse reaching more than 160 million monthly viewers. Founded by Jarret Myer and Brian Brater, it owns brands including UPROXX, HipHopDX and Dime Magazine, produces original music and culture programming, runs a content studio for brand campaigns, and - after going independent again in 2024 alongside will.i.am and Rich Antoniello - sells media across YouTube and CTV while folding AI into how it makes and monetizes content.
Campbell McLaren
Campbell McLaren is the co-creator of the UFC and the CEO and founder of Combate Global, the first Hispanic MMA sports and media franchise. The Scottish-born, American-raised TV producer dreamed up a 'no rules' fighting tournament inspired by the video game Mortal Kombat, produced the first 22 UFC events, and coined the slogan that both built and nearly buried the sport. Decades later he reinvented himself by betting on Latino fighters and audiences, building Combate Global into one of the most valuable combat sports organizations in the world.
Amit Dayal
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Lara Cohen
Lara Cohen is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Media, Creators & AI at Cloudflare, where she leads efforts to help publishers and creators control, protect, and monetize their content in the age of AI crawlers. A veteran of Twitter (two stints spanning nearly a decade), she orchestrated some of the platform's most iconic cultural moments - including Ellen DeGeneres' record-shattering 2014 Oscars selfie - before serving as SVP at Linktree, championing fair creator compensation at scale. Now at Cloudflare, she sits at the intersection of internet infrastructure and the creator economy, building the policy and partnership frameworks that will define how human-created content interacts with AI systems.
Dashverse
Dashverse is an AI-native entertainment company building tools and platforms that let anyone create, publish and monetize stories - from comics to microdramas - at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional production. Its ecosystem includes Frameo.AI (generative video studio), DashReels and ShortFree (microdrama apps), and Dashtoon (AI comics).
Fandom
Fandom is the world's largest fan platform - a sprawling network of 250,000+ community-built wikis covering movies, TV, gaming and anime, reaching about 350 million monthly visitors. Born as Wikicities in 2004 from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, it grew into a for-profit pop-culture reference engine and, after acquiring GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs and Giant Bomb in 2022, also one of the loudest editorial voices in entertainment.
Inkitt
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.
Ali Albazaz
Ali Albazaz is the founder and CEO of Inkitt, a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing platform that uses reader engagement data and algorithms to identify and publish bestselling fiction. Born in Baghdad and raised in Germany, he bootstrapped Inkitt from a Berlin startup after 140 investor rejections into a $400M+ valued company with 33 million users across three platforms: Inkitt (writer community), Galatea (immersive reading app), and CandyJar (video entertainment). Inkitt has raised $116.8M in total funding, including a $37M Series C led by Khosla Ventures in February 2024.
David Lee
David Lee is the Co-founder and CEO of Nex, a San Jose-based motion gaming company that makes the Nex Playground - a palm-sized AI console that uses motion-tracking cameras to turn living rooms into active play spaces. A Hong Kong native and second-time founder, Lee previously co-founded EditGrid (acquired by Apple in 2008), spent over eight years as a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple leading iWork for iCloud, then left in 2017 to build Nex. The company has raised $40M across three rounds from investors including the NBA, Will Smith's Dreamers Fund, and Blue Pool Capital, with celebrity backers like Steve Nash, Jeremy Lin, Mark Cuban, Simu Liu, and Thierry Henry. Nex Playground launched in December 2023 at $179, sold 600,000+ units in 2025, and landed on Fast Company's Most Innovative Gaming Companies of 2026 and TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies of 2026.
Jay Sullivan
Jay Sullivan is the CEO of Fandom, the world's largest fan platform with 350 million monthly visitors spanning wikis, gaming, movies, TV, and pop culture. A Yale-trained applied mathematician turned product visionary, Sullivan built his career shepherding the open web at Mozilla—where he served as SVP of Product, COO, and Interim CEO—before stints driving product at Groupon, Facebook's Reality Labs AI team, and Twitter's consumer and revenue products. Co-inventor of three US patents and co-founder of PhoneSpots (acquired 2007), he has spent two decades building platforms at mass scale. Since joining Fandom in February 2026, he is steering the company from a Google-traffic-dependent reference destination toward a real-time, AI-powered fan engagement platform.
Nina Perez
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
Sanidhya Narain
Sanidhya Narain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dashverse, the parent company behind Dashtoon, DashReels, and Frameo.AI - a portfolio of AI-native entertainment platforms reaching 20+ million users worldwide. A chemical engineer turned content entrepreneur, Narain spent nearly four years at Pocket FM building its global content engine to $120M in revenue before pivoting to his conviction that generative AI would do for storytelling what the camera phone did for photography. Dashverse raised a $13M Series A led by Peak XV Partners in August 2025 and, by early 2026, had inked a multi-year deal with Harlequin to co-produce animated microdramas using its Frameo.AI studio.
Sirasom Si
Sirasom Si is the Chief Executive Officer of Fandom, the world's largest fan platform and wiki hosting service headquartered in San Francisco. With over 350 million monthly visitors, Fandom hosts tens of thousands of fan communities spanning gaming, TV, movies, anime, and pop culture. Based in Bangkok, Thailand, Si leads a company that has raised over $239 million in funding and generates approximately $175 million in annual revenue, sitting at the intersection of community-driven content, entertainment media, and digital advertising.