Tagged: esports
20 results
Lucra
Lucra is a B2B competitive-loyalty platform that lets brands run live social competitions - tournaments, head-to-head challenges and mini-games - inside their own apps and websites through a white-label SDK. Originally launched in 2019 as a peer-to-peer real-money sports gaming app, the company pivoted to selling gamified engagement as a modern alternative to points-based loyalty programs, handling compliance, payments and fraud as a merchant of record. Its clients include Dave & Buster's, Five Iron Golf, TouchTunes and ChessKings, and in April 2026 it raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest's venture fund - ARK's first time leading an early-stage deal.
Dylan Robbins
Dylan Robbins is the founder and CEO of Lucra, a New York-based company that gives brands a white-label software kit for running peer-to-peer, real-money gaming and competitions inside their own apps. A former Goldman Sachs and AQR analyst with a Stanford MBA and a Duke undergraduate degree, Robbins started Lucra in 2019 with co-founder Michael Madding after the two spent years informally tracking sports wagers with friends. He pivoted the company from a consumer app to a B2B2C SDK in 2023, and in 2026 raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest - the fund's first lead investment in a non-AI startup.
Marius Meiners
Marius Meiners is the co-founder and CEO of Peec AI, a Berlin company that tells brands whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini mention them - and how. A former top-100 League of Legends player who later worked in venture capital and M&A at PwC before joining Antler's Berlin cohort, he vibe-coded Peec's first prototype in a day and a half with V0 after not writing code for four years, signed eight letters of intent before building the real product, and priced it at 85 euros a month while competitors charged 500-plus. Peec launched in February 2025 and crossed roughly 10 million dollars in annualized revenue about 15 months later, raising about 29 million dollars from investors including Singular, 20VC, and Antler.
Evil Geniuses
Evil Geniuses is one of the oldest and most storied esports organizations in North America. Founded in 1999 as a Quake clan, EG built a legacy across Dota 2, StarCraft, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, and Valorant, most famously winning Dota 2's The International 2015 for a then-record payout and Valorant Champions 2023. Now headquartered in Seattle and owned by Chicago investment firm PEAK6, the company runs competitive teams, a content-creator roster, youth and community programs, and a direct-to-consumer merchandise line.
Ola Guild Games
Ola Guild Games (OLA GG) is the largest Web3 gaming community in the Spanish-speaking world, operating as a regional subDAO of Yield Guild Games. Founded by lifelong Hispanic gamers, it onboards players across Latin America and Spain into blockchain games through NFT scholarships, Web3 education, and a shared-rewards model that lets people play and earn without upfront cost. In 2022 it raised $8 million in seed funding from investors including Galaxy Interactive, BITKRAFT, and Arca.
Chris DeAppolonio
Chris DeAppolonio is the CEO of Evil Geniuses, North America's oldest esports organization. A sports-business lifer who wrote his 2008 NYU master's thesis on the coming rise of professional gaming, he spent a decade in traditional sports marketing before crossing into esports as a team president and innovation chief. He now runs EG on a data-first, 'Moneyball' philosophy, pairing proprietary analytics and AI with player development to scout undervalued talent and chase championships.
Nico del Pino
Nico del Pino is the co-founder and CEO of Ola Guild Games (OLA GG), the largest web3 gaming community in the Hispanic world. A subDAO of Yield Guild Games, OLA GG sets out to turn play into financial inclusion for the 500-million-plus Spanish-speaking market across Latin America and beyond. A crypto and fintech operator for more than a decade, del Pino co-founded Liquid Meta (the first publicly traded liquidity-mining company), ran fintech at Endeavor, and led sales at NASDAQ-listed dLocal before betting his career on the idea that owning your in-game economy could change a household's bottom line.
Ari Evans
Ari Evans is the founder and CEO of Maestro, the Los Angeles-based white-label live streaming and interactive video platform he started in 2015. He built Maestro on a simple conviction: creators and rights holders should own their audiences and data instead of renting them from algorithm-driven giants. The platform powers interactive streams, monetization and analytics for clients ranging from Billie Eilish and Post Malone to Epic Games, PlayStation and ViacomCBS, and counts Sony Music among its investors. A former Zynga product manager who ran CityVille at its peak, Evans frames the creator economy as the biggest job-creation engine since the Industrial Revolution.
Phillip Hyun
Phillip Hyun is the CEO of Gamevice, the Simi Valley hardware company (formerly Wikipad) that builds clip-on game controllers for phones and tablets, and the co-founder and vice chairman of the esports organization Gen.G. He has spent a decade running an eight-person hardware shop that has repeatedly taken Nintendo to court over the Switch's detachable controllers, a David-and-Goliath patent fight that reached the Federal Circuit in 2026. A UC Berkeley cognitive science graduate, Hyun has built and sold companies (Enterprise Technology Group to Nexstar Broadcasting), helped launch a top-tier global esports brand, and more recently turned investor in the Italian football club Venezia FC.
Twitch
Twitch is the world's largest live-streaming platform, where creators broadcast video games, IRL content, music, and talk shows to a real-time audience that talks back in chat. Founded as a gaming-focused spin-off of Justin.tv in 2011 and acquired by Amazon in 2014, Twitch turned watching someone play a game into a social, participatory medium, building a creator economy powered by subscriptions, Bits, ads, and a culture of emotes and live community.
David Tokheim
David Tokheim is a senior executive at Adobe where he has served since 2013, most recently elevated to SVP, CXO Americas Industry and Canadian Sales (April 2026). Previously VP of Experience Cloud leading the Media & Entertainment, Communications, and Travel/Hospitality verticals, he has spent his career at the intersection of digital media, advertising technology, and enterprise software. Before Adobe, he was EVP & GM at Six Apart Media (growing its blog audience to 220 million monthly uniques), SVP at Fox Interactive Media overseeing monetization across MySpace and IGN, and VP of Marketing at IGN Entertainment where he built strategic programs for brands like Pepsi, EA, and Walmart. A UCLA English grad turned ad-tech veteran, he champions AI-driven personalization and content velocity as the defining imperatives of modern customer experience.
Ninja
Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins is the world's most recognized gaming streamer, having transformed competitive gaming into mainstream entertainment. Starting as a Halo pro in 2009, he became the face of Fortnite's cultural takeover - playing live with Drake to a record 628,000 concurrent viewers in 2018 - and parlayed that moment into a media empire spanning Twitch, YouTube, brand deals with Red Bull and Adidas, a Chief Innovation Officer role at GameSquare Holdings, and a co-founded cashew milk brand. With 19+ million Twitch followers and 23+ million YouTube subscribers, he continues to define what a professional streamer can become.
Valkyrae
Rachell Marie Hofstetter, known as Valkyrae, is a Filipino-American streamer, co-owner of 100 Thieves, and founder of Hihi Studios. After a record-breaking YouTube exclusivity run powered by late-2020 Among Us, she returned to Twitch in January 2025 on her tenth streaming anniversary and is now building anime-inspired IP through her own studio.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Kun Gao
Kun Gao is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and original CEO of Crunchyroll, the platform that turned anime from a niche US curiosity into a billion-dollar streaming giant (acquired by Sony/AT&T WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion). Now he's doing it again as Co-Founder and CEO of Forge (forge.gg), a San Francisco-based game marketing and loyalty platform that hit 1 million users within its first year. Alongside co-founders Dennis 'Thresh' Fong (the world's first professional esports player) and George Ng, Gao is building the infrastructure layer that indie game developers desperately need: no-code loyalty programs, player analytics, and direct community channels - without the walled gardens.
Jonathan Lai
Jonathan Lai is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the Speedrun investment program and the Games vertical. A Harvard-trained economist turned product manager turned VC, he built his career arc through Morgan Stanley's investment banking floors, Riot Games' League of Legends product team, Dots (acquired by Take-Two for $192M), and Tencent's North America investments desk before landing at a16z. His investment thesis sits at the intersection of AI and creative technology - believing that the same retention-loop design principles that made League of Legends the world's most-played PC game are now reshaping enterprise software, fintech, and the next generation of AI-native consumer apps.
Samira Behrouzan
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Tips Out
Tips Out (known online as TipsOutBaby) is a gaming entrepreneur and Creator Scout at Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Games division, operating at the intersection of creator culture and venture capital. Best known as co-founder and COO/CEO of One True King (OTK) - the Austin-based creator collective he helped launch in October 2020 alongside Asmongold, Mizkif, Esfand, and Rich Campbell - he has quietly built one of gaming's most ambitious creator-led business empires. Beyond OTK, he co-founded Starforge Systems (a PC hardware company), Mythic Talent (a talent management agency), and Mad Mushroom (a creator-led game publishing label). In October 2023, a16z tapped him as a Games Creator Scout, formalizing his role as a bridge between gaming culture and the startup investment world.
Kevin Lin
Kevin Lin is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and co-founder of Twitch.tv — the live-streaming platform acquired by Amazon for ~$970 million in 2014. Serving as COO for 12.5 years, he helped grow Twitch to 90%+ market share, $1.5B annual revenue, and 2,000+ employees. After departing in 2020, he co-founded Metatheory (a Web3 gaming company backed by a16z), launched Lifelike Capital (an early-stage VC fund), and co-created the Ikigai Launchpad accelerator in Taipei — all while staying deeply rooted in his Taiwanese heritage and AAPI community through Gold House.
Shaan Puri
Shaan Puri is an Indian-American entrepreneur, angel investor, and podcast host best known for co-hosting My First Million with Sam Parr - one of the top business podcasts with 25M+ downloads annually. He sold Bebo to Twitch (Amazon) for up to $25M in 2019, launched and sold the Milk Road crypto newsletter in an eight-figure deal in 2023, and built Bums and Roses into a $25M/year baby products brand with his wife. A self-described contrarian on hard work ('hard work is massively overrated'), he now focuses on content creation, early-stage investing, and writing through his Good Friday newsletter and One Hour Books project.