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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.