gamified-learning
(12)
MySivi
MySivi is a Bengaluru-based, AI-powered English-speaking practice app (Y Combinator W22) that helps Indian and global learners build spoken fluency through conversation with an AI teacher named Arya, real-time feedback on grammar and pronunciation, gamified lessons, and a peer-learning community. Originally launched as Speakify AI, it operates on a freemium model and has grown to millions of Android downloads.
Parrot
Parrot is a San Francisco-based, Y Combinator (Fall 2025) language-learning app that works like TikTok for Spanish. Learners swipe through short, native-speaker videos with tappable subtitles and an AI tutor, absorbing the language through comprehensible input rather than flashcard drills. The company positions itself as the app that actually produces speakers, aiming to turn idle scrolling into real conversational fluency.
BankersLab
BankersLab is a fintech education and decisioning company that builds 'flight simulator' style software for lenders and bankers. Founded in 2012 by Michelle Katics and Kurt Gingher, it lets banks, credit unions and lenders practice consumer, retail and SME portfolio management in a risk-free simulation environment, then extends that same engine into AI-enhanced decision support. Its gamified, team-based workshops - ScoringLab, CreditLab, CollectionLab and InsightLab - have trained thousands of banking professionals across 30+ countries.
DopaGE
DopaGE is a Los Angeles-area health education company that trains young adults to prevent, recognize, and respond to drug overdoses through gamified, neuroscience-informed online courses. Built by physicians, neuroscientists, and emergency medical personnel and grown out of the student non-profit T.A.C.O., DopaGE sells annual subscriptions to colleges and offers family training so students can learn life-saving skills - fentanyl awareness, naloxone use, and overdose response - in a format they actually want to complete.
Moonlight
Moonlight is a San Francisco seed-stage startup founded in 2023 by Stanford MBA and former Activision product manager Siran Jiang. It began as Moonlight Focus, a science-backed productivity and biohacking app built around ultradian rhythms, live focus tracking and flow-state interventions, and has since evolved toward Moonlight AI - a personalized learning platform that turns any topic into gamified, AI-generated quests for children. Across both incarnations, the through-line is the same: use behavioral science and playful mechanics to help people direct their attention on purpose.
Parsnip
Parsnip is a New York-based consumer AI startup building the "Duolingo for cooking" - a personalized learning engine that teaches people to cook through short, gamified lessons instead of just handing them recipes. Founded by PhDs Andrew Mao and Dan Sosa, the app maps cooking into a knowledge graph of 400+ skill levels and uses a human-in-the-loop LLM system to generate lessons, teaching the hows and whys behind food so novice cooks gain confidence in the kitchen.
Madhu Yalamarthi
Madhu Yalamarthi is the cofounder and CEO of Modak, a fintech company building a Visa debit card and gamified family app that teaches kids and teens to manage money through chores, allowances, savings goals, and rewards. A first-generation high school graduate from rural India, he earned an MBA and MS from Stanford, where he made Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10%), then spent years as a Vice President at GGV Capital deploying roughly $200 million across 14 startups, five of which became unicorns. He left the investor's chair to build the thing he believed in: turning financial literacy into something kids actually want to practice.
Michelle Katics
Michelle Katics is the co-founder and CEO of BankersLab and PortfolioQuest, SaaS simulation platforms she describes as flight simulators for bankers. After two decades inside the machinery of global finance - the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the IMF, Fair Isaac (FICO), and Standard Chartered - she decided the best way to teach risk was to let people lose fake money first. Her platforms run synthetic loan portfolios with more than a trillion possible outcomes, training bankers in over 45 countries. A fixture of the Singapore and Southeast Asian fintech scene, she has been named to the Women in FinTech Power List and recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Siran Jiang
Siran Jiang is the CEO and cofounder of Moonlight, a San Francisco edtech startup that began as a gamified focus-and-productivity app and grew into an AI-powered personalized learning platform turning lessons into quests for kids. A daughter of generations of teachers, she traded a finance-and-entertainment resume that runs from Evercore and Warburg Pincus to MGM Studios and Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty for a mission built on attention. She holds a BA from Columbia and an MBA from Stanford GSB, and on the side has spent over a decade as a college admissions tutor.
RoboTerra, Inc.
RoboTerra, Inc. is a Silicon Valley educational robotics company founded in 2014 that teaches middle- and high-school students to build robots and write real code. Its flagship Origin Kit pairs more than 85 hardware components and the RoboCore controller with the cloud-based, gamified Castle Rock learning platform, turning C++ programming into something a 10-year-old can pick up. Led by founder and CEO Yao Zhang, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, the company set out to make hands-on robotics education accessible far beyond elite schools, reaching institutions across dozens of countries.
Goalsetter
Goalsetter is a New York-based financial education and banking platform that teaches American kids, teens, and families how to save, spend smart, and invest. Founded by Tanya Van Court, it blends FDIC-insured savings, a 'Learn to Earn' debit card, and pop-culture-flavored financial quizzes mapped to national standards. The company also runs Goalsetter Classroom, a K-12 curriculum used by schools, framing financial literacy as a tool for closing the racial wealth gap.
Cuemath
Cuemath is an after-school, live, one-on-one online math tutoring platform for students from kindergarten through grade 12. Founded in 2013 by IIT-Delhi alumnus Manan Khurma, the company teaches math (and coding) as a life skill through its proprietary Cuemath Leap classroom, where expert tutors cue rather than tell students toward answers. Backed by Google, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India) and Alpha Wave, Cuemath serves over 200,000 students across 80+ countries with a US Common Core-aligned curriculum.