gamification
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Dilsher Singh Malhi and the game that outgrew its board
A childhood habit of organizing games became Zupee, a business built around India’s familiar pastimes. Now its founder faces a different test: carrying his ideas about human behavior into a future beyond gaming.
Ahmed Khairy and the Trouble With Coming Back
He returned to entrepreneurship to help brands bring customers back. At Gameball, Ahmed Khairy has found that loyalty involves as much doubt, discipline and arithmetic as it does rewards.
Gal Rimon and the Trouble with Keeping Score
Before he founded Centrical, Gal Rimon learned how it felt to go from team captain to last place on the national youth squad. His career has become a long inquiry into what happens after somebody tells you to improve.
Sweet gives fandom something to do.
A highlight can sit in a wallet forever. Sweet is betting that fans would rather put it to work - collecting, competing, and earning a reason to come back.
Kris Duggan and the Trouble with Keeping Score
From Badgeville to Betterworks, Kris Duggan kept returning to a stubborn question: what makes people follow through? His career in sales, software and coaching offers some answers, with a few detours through the garage.
Krishna Depura and the trouble with a good idea
Krishna Depura began with quizzes and virtual treasure hunts. Building Mindtickle meant learning when to keep playing, when to change the rules, and when a useful idea needed a harder question.
The Dashboard Was Right. The Employee Was Still Stuck.
Centrical began with a simple irritation: companies could measure frontline work but struggled to improve it. Its answer is a loop that turns a number on a screen into practice, coaching and a second look at the result.
The Loyalty Program That Had to Learn Accounting
Gameball sells points, tiers and little moments of delight. Its more revealing work is less theatrical: joining scattered customer records, making rewards redeemable everywhere, and keeping the cost of generosity visible.
The Calendar That Learned to Go Looking
Seeker began by asking travelers to share the places they loved. Then it found the more interesting problem: towns already had plenty to share, but no sane way to keep track of it all.
Mittun makes the second click count
A nonprofit can win your attention and still lose you on the way to a donation. Mittun builds the websites, scoreboards, and small moments of recognition that connect those two acts.
Antavo Wants to Make the Loyalty Card Feel Less Like Homework
The London scaleup powers points, tiers, prize wheels and perks for brands from KFC to Hyatt. Its real pitch is less visible: let marketers change a global loyalty program without waiting in engineering's queue.
Maya Cadena Keeps Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
The Vetted founder has built, sold, studied, raised, opened, closed and started again. Her latest bet turns everyday pet care into a game - and makes the pivot itself part of the product story.
The Company That Turned Video Games Into a Cancer Lab
An Allen, Texas company spent years convincing gamers that tracing a line in Minecraft could help fight cancer. Then it had to figure out how to get paid for it.
The Quiz App That Ate 90% of American Schools Just Changed Its Name
Two Indian engineers built a math game nobody could keep fed with content. So they handed the tools to teachers instead - and accidentally built one of the most-used classroom platforms on Earth.
Vetted Bet That Pet Care Should Feel Like a Game - and Pay You Back
A Miami Beach startup closed its vet clinics, bought an Israeli AI app, and rebuilt itself around Care Coins - digital points you earn for walking, brushing and feeding your dog, then trade for real discounts. The pitch: what if Strava and Duolingo had a puppy?
Mohammad Almadani Built Classera for the Places the Internet Barely Reached
A dorm-room partnership became a learning platform used across more than 40 countries. Almadani's wager is simple: education technology matters most when it works under imperfect conditions.
Skool
How a deliberately plain community platform - five tabs, one price, and a points-for-likes game - became the default home for the paid-community economy.
Optimove
The Israeli-born CRM marketing company spent a decade teaching brands to talk to customers one at a time. Now it wants to dissolve the marketing org chart entirely.
Forumbee
Build a thriving online community and knowledge base to engage users, deflect tickets, and accelerate product adoption.
Bettermode
Launch fast with no code and turn engagement into measurable retention and growth.
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.
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.