Tagged: gamification
23 results
Hang
Hang is a New York-based software company building an AI-powered marketing and loyalty platform for consumer brands. Marketed as 'the autonomous marketing system,' Hang replaces static points programs with personalized, gamified rewards - branded minigames, dynamic quests and 1:1 offers - alongside self-cleaning customer data, smart segments and AI-driven campaigns. It launched in 2022 as an NFT-powered membership platform backed by a $16M Series A from Paradigm, then repositioned around AI and now serves restaurant, beauty, apparel and e-commerce brands such as Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Hattie B's.
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.
Bevy
Bevy is a Palo Alto-based enterprise SaaS company that builds a community engagement platform used by large brands to run virtual, hybrid, and in-person events, forums, and member programs at scale. Founded by Derek Andersen out of the technology built for his earlier venture Startup Grind, Bevy grew through the 2019 acquisition of community-professional network CMX and the 2021 acquisition of event-tech company Eventtus, and has since layered in AI features - including a 2025 Engagement Hub built on the acquired Intros AI - to help community managers with matchmaking, moderation, content generation, and analytics. Customers include Atlassian, Salesforce, Slack, Asana, and Google's Developer Groups program.
Classera
Classera is an edtech company that runs a cloud-based Learning Super Platform used across K-12 schools, universities, and corporate and government training programs. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco with deep roots in the MENA region, it pairs a core learning management system with gamification, AI-driven personalization, virtual-reality content, an educational marketplace (Edumalls), and embedded payments (C-Pay). The platform serves more than 12 million users in over 40 countries and, in October 2022, raised a $40M Series A led by Sanabil Investments - reportedly the largest edtech funding round in MENA and most of Africa.
Springshot
Springshot is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that builds a cloud and mobile orchestration platform for airline and airport operations. It connects frontline ground crews, assets and systems in real time - turning raw operational data into structured 'missions' that streamline communication, automate task distribution, digitize compliance and deliver live analytics. Trusted by major global carriers and ground handlers across hundreds of airports, Springshot also extends into facilities, logistics, hospitality, stadiums and healthcare.
Gratia Health
Gratia Health is an Austin-based health-tech startup that turns everyday clinical work into measurable results. Its Workforce Activation Platform uses behavioral-science-designed incentives, real-time recognition, and gamification - points, badges, streaks, and patient shoutouts - to help hospitals keep nurses engaged, cover shifts, and cut spending on expensive contract labor. Emerged from stealth in November 2023 with seed funding led by JumpStart Capital and a launch partnership with ScionHealth's 70-plus specialty hospitals.
Joon Health
Joon Health is a San Francisco-based pediatric behavioral health company (YC W22) that turns real-life routines into a video game for kids with ADHD, autism, anxiety and depression. Children care for a virtual pet called a Doter, leveling it up by completing parent- and clinician-assigned tasks like chores, homework and hygiene. Founded in 2021 by three UC Berkeley grads, Joon has reached over 500,000 users and 18,000 paying subscribers, and raised $6.4M in 2023 to become a first-line digital treatment for pediatric behavior disorders.
The Pause Technologies Inc.
The Pause Technologies Inc. is a Phoenix-based, female-founded healthtech company building Harmoni, an AI companion for women navigating perimenopause, menopause, and beyond. Its app pairs a 24/7 AI wellness coach with symptom tracking, wearable data (Apple Health, Fitbit, Oura, Garmin), gamified journeys, and clinician-reviewed content to turn the confusing hormonal transition into something women can understand and act on. Founded by AI entrepreneur and MIT Sloan graduate Susan Sly with clinician Dr. Mia Chorney, the company is targeting the roughly 50 million U.S. women experiencing menopause symptoms.
Ashley Rose
Ashley Rose is the co-founder and CEO of Living Security, the Austin-based company that turned dull compliance-checkbox security training into a data-driven discipline it helped name: Human Risk Management. She built the company in 2017 with her husband Drew, starting with in-person cyber escape rooms and scaling into an AI-native platform used by enterprises like Mastercard, Verizon, CVS Health and JPMorgan. A product-obsessed entrepreneur who once funded a kids' snap-change swimwear line on Kickstarter, Rose argues the industry has the human problem backwards: people are not the weakest link, they are the largest attack surface worth investing in.
Isaac Eaves
Isaac Eaves is the co-founder and CEO of Joon, a San Francisco startup that turns kids' real-life chores and routines into a video game they actually want to play. A UC Berkeley computer science and business grad who ran profitable Minecraft servers as a teenager and worked in product at Workday, he took Joon through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. His pitch is simple: he spent 10,000 hours gaming as a kid, so he knows exactly what keeps a child glued to a screen - and he is bending that same pull toward homework, bedtime, and brushing teeth.
Shawn Dastmalchi
Shawn Dastmalchi is a serial healthcare-technology entrepreneur and the CEO of Gratia Health, an Austin-based startup that uses behavioral science and incentive design to keep nurses on the job. A UC Berkeley PhD in vision science, he co-founded and led Apixio, a clinical big-data company later acquired by Centene, then built Ark.one Health out of an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Sutter Health. Across 25-plus years in life sciences, medical devices and health IT, his throughline is turning messy clinical data into decisions - and, at Gratia, turning the daily grind of a hospital floor into reasons for nurses to stay.
WIT
WIT is a New York-based gamification and digital activation platform that helps pro sports teams and Fortune 1000 brands turn casual fans into engaged, identifiable participants. Through a library of 30+ turnkey experiences - giveaways, polls, brackets, vote-to-win, fan maps and fan walls - WIT collects first-party data, sources authentic fan content, fulfills sponsor obligations and drives revenue. Founded in 2018 by Vaidhy Murti, it now powers activations for roughly 100 venues, leagues and teams across the NFL, NHL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, NWSL and NCAA, plus brands like Coca-Cola and Bud Light.
Living Security
Living Security is an Austin-based cybersecurity company that pioneered Human Risk Management (HRM), moving organizations beyond check-the-box compliance training toward measurable behavior change. Its AI-native Unify platform correlates behavioral, identity, and threat signals to find the small share of employees who drive most of an organization's risk, then guides targeted interventions. Founded in 2017 by Ashley and Drew Rose, the company serves more than 100 enterprises including Fortune 500 names, and was named a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave for Human Risk Management Solutions.
SparkPlug
SparkPlug is a San Francisco-based incentive management platform that turns frontline retail and restaurant employees into a brand's most effective sales force. By integrating directly with point-of-sale systems, it automates sales contests, goals, and commissions - often funded by the brands and vendors whose products those employees sell - and pays rewards out automatically. The company works with thousands of retail locations and hundreds of brand partners, betting that the people closest to the customer are the most underused influence in physical commerce.
Andrew Duffy
Andrew Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of SparkPlug, a San Francisco software company that pays frontline retail and restaurant workers cash bonuses for the sales they actually drive. A behavioral-science nerd from Harvard who put in time at Bridgewater Associates and built a luxury whole-leaf tea brand before this, Duffy turned a teenage hot streak selling margaritas into a venture-backed platform that has routed millions of dollars in supplemental income to hourly employees and raised $11.5 million to keep going.
Abhishek Kumar
Abhishek Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Xoxoday, a Bengaluru-based SaaS platform that powers rewards, incentives, and employee engagement for 5,000+ enterprises worldwide. An IIT Bombay alumnus who previously co-founded EveningFlavours (an early food-discovery startup), Abhishek has helped grow Xoxoday from a 2012 experiences marketplace into a $100M+ funded global platform processing 250,000 transactions daily, with products spanning employee engagement, sales gamification, consumer loyalty, and API-based transactional rewards.
Nishant Mungali
Nishant Mungali is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a unicorn in 2021. An IIT Guwahati-trained designer and engineer, he co-founded Mindtickle in 2011 alongside Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, and Deepak Diwakar after experimenting with online gamification through a group called TeraMeraIdea. Mungali has been the product and design force behind Mindtickle's evolution from a gamified onboarding tool to a $1.2 billion platform serving over 2,000 enterprises globally with AI-powered sales coaching, training, and readiness capabilities.
Sumit Khandelwal
Sumit Khandelwal is Co-Founder and CEO of Xoxoday, a global rewards, incentives, and loyalty technology platform he built from a borrowed desk in Bengaluru in 2012 into a profitable enterprise serving 5,000+ clients across 175+ countries, processing 250,000 transactions daily and surpassing $1 billion in cumulative GMV. A software engineer turned FMCG product manager turned SaaS founder, Sumit embodies the rare combination of technical grounding and brand-building instinct, steering Xoxoday through a Series C raise in January 2026 and eyeing a potential IPO by late 2027 or early 2028.
MEandMine
MEandMine is a Silicon Valley startup that uses AI and neuroscience-backed games to surface the silent struggles of K-12 students. Its platform delivers ten minutes a day of personalized, gamified skill-building, while an AI engine flags psychological risk by analyzing 160+ in-game behaviors, giving teachers and counselors real-time signals for early intervention.
Wen Miao
Wen Miao is the co-founder and CEO of Lava.ai, a San Francisco-based company building real-time AI-powered customer engagement and loyalty platforms for sports teams, entertainment venues, and enterprise brands. Before Lava.ai, he was SVP and GM at TIBCO Software, where he led global client services and launched real-time predictive customer engagement platforms. Lava.ai counts Real Madrid, the LA Rams, the Sacramento Kings, and the Cleveland Browns among its clients, and has raised over $33.7M in funding. In 2015, Computerworld named Miao a Premier 100 IT Leader.
Elinor Huang
Elinor (Wen-Hsin) Huang is the Founder and CEO of MEandMine, a San Jose-based AI-powered mental health platform for K-12 students that uses gamified, neuroscience-backed tools to help children build emotional regulation skills before crises emerge. Motivated by the loss of an MIT classmate to suicide and the 11-year average gap between symptom onset and treatment, she built MEandMine into a certified B Corp with partnerships spanning Google, Stanford Medicine, and the NYC Department of Education, and raised $6.6M in venture funding including a $4.5M round in June 2024.
Touseef Ikram
Touseef Ikram is a 20+ year marketing technologist, serial entrepreneur, and digital product leader currently serving as Associate Director of Digital Products at Interlink Multimedia (Geo TV / Jang Media Group) in Karachi. From building Pakistan's pre-Facebook social network Stop.pk (100K+ users) to helping HarPalGeo become the world's #1 YouTube channel for three consecutive months, he operates at the rare intersection of technology, marketing, and product thinking. He founded Taxlytics (open-data tax analytics), PakSatire.com (political satire animations), invented the GPLLG life-prediction framework, and secured a Google News Initiative grant — making him one of Pakistan's most quietly disruptive digital builders.