gaming
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APY Ventures bets on the work before the applause
A game before launch. A factory visit before a cheque. Inside the Turkish venture-fund umbrella that treats the next milestone as the real pitch.
Helpshift and the art of keeping players in the game
A missing reward. A locked account. A player reaching for the exit. Helpshift puts support inside the game, then asks whether that small intervention can protect a much larger relationship.
Sony’s Quiet Trick: Own the Camera, the Console and What Plays on Both
Sony spent decades assembling a strange collection of consoles, cameras, songs, films and sensors. Now the collection is becoming a system - and its smartest lesson is knowing when the pieces truly reinforce one another.
The Fund Betting That the Hard Problems Are Made of Atoms, Not Apps
A $66 million debut fund is putting first checks into space refueling, biometric firearms and board games - on the theory that the world's hardest problems are made of atoms, not apps.
The Casino That Built a Destination Around the Bet
Pechanga turned a tribal gaming hall into a 200,000-square-foot casino wrapped in a hotel, spa, golf course, theaters and a pool complex the size of five football fields. The wager is only one part of the weekend.
Ocean Casino Resort
Ocean Casino Resort took Atlantic City's most conspicuous white elephant and turned it into a business built on the one thing rivals cannot copy: the view. Now a fresh owner, another renovation cycle and a wider entertainment portfolio are testing how far that advantage can travel.
HBSE Ventures
HBSE Ventures is built around a useful wager: the best sports-tech investor may be the one that can turn teams, venues and fans into a living laboratory. Its portfolio shows how wide that laboratory has become.
Ampverse
Ampverse is a Singapore-founded, creator-first gaming and entertainment company that connects consumer brands and game publishers with gaming audiences across Southeast Asia, India and the Gulf. It owns and operates gaming media properties, esports teams and creator networks, and packages them into marketing, in-game advertising, publishing and analytics services for brands like Coca-Cola, KFC and Red Bull. The group reaches a claimed 600M+ fans through its owned assets and managed creators.
CreativeMode
CreativeMode is a no-code, AI-powered platform that lets Minecraft players build their own mods by describing what they want in plain English. It generates ready-to-play mobs, items, blocks, weapons and structures for both Java and Bedrock editions, then lets creators publish, share and compete with them. Founded in 2024 by three ex-Crusoe engineers and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, CreativeMode says players have made more than 450,000 mods on the platform.
Concept Labs
Concept Labs (formerly Concept Art House) is a San Francisco-based creative and Web3 studio that builds NFTs, digital collectibles, and games for the world's biggest brands and IP. Founded in 2007 by James Zhang, the company spent over a decade producing art for AAA game franchises before pivoting to Web3, and has shipped more than 1,000 games and collectibles for partners including UFC, the NFL, the International Olympic Committee, Gucci, and Frank Miller's Sin City. It raised a $25M Series A in 2021 led by Dapper Labs.
GGWP
GGWP is a San Francisco-based AI company that builds moderation and community-safety tools for online games, media networks and large fan communities. Founded in 2020 by esports pioneer Dennis 'Thresh' Fong, Crunchyroll co-founder Kun Gao and data scientist Dr. George Ng, its Community Copilot platform uses machine learning to detect toxic behavior across text chat, voice, usernames and Discord, triage player reports, and track long-term player reputation - across 20+ languages. GGWP has moderated tens of billions of messages across 100+ games and works with publishers including Unity, Sony, Krafton and Fandom.
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.
Jabali
Jabali is a generative-AI game engine that lets people build and publish playable 2D and 3D games by describing them in plain language, no coding required. Founded in 2023 by former Meta, Amazon, Zynga and Microsoft gaming executives alongside AI researchers, the company wants to do for game creation what ChatGPT did for writing. It raised a $5M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures with Sony Innovation Fund and Sapphire Sport participating, and opened its Jabali Studio platform in early access in October 2025.
Astrocade
Astrocade is an AI-powered social gaming platform that lets anyone build, remix, share and play casual games from natural-language prompts - no coding required. A coordinated team of generative AI agents handle art, sound, mechanics and UI, turning a sentence into a playable game in minutes. Co-founded by AI researchers Amir and Ali Sadeghian alongside Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, the company is backed by Sequoia, Google, NVIDIA and others.
Forge
Forge is a San Francisco gaming platform that gives game developers no-code tools to playtest, market, and sell their titles - turning static Steam landing pages into interactive hubs powered by quests, loyalty rewards, and verified-gamer audiences. Spun out of GGWP in late 2023 with $11M in seed funding, Forge has crossed one million users and partnered with 75+ studios.
Roblox
Roblox is an online platform and game-creation system where users build, publish, and play 3D experiences made by other users. Rather than producing its own games, Roblox provides the engine (Roblox Studio), hosting, social layer, and a virtual currency (Robux) that lets a global community of creators turn ideas into playable worlds - and, increasingly, into income. With roughly 132 million daily active users and more than $1 billion paid out to creators in a single year, it has become one of the largest user-generated entertainment platforms in the world.
Fandom
Fandom is the world's largest fan platform - a sprawling network of 250,000+ community-built wikis covering movies, TV, gaming and anime, reaching about 350 million monthly visitors. Born as Wikicities in 2004 from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, it grew into a for-profit pop-culture reference engine and, after acquiring GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs and Giant Bomb in 2022, also one of the loudest editorial voices in entertainment.
Incode
Incode is an AI-powered identity verification platform that lets businesses confirm who is really on the other side of a screen — in under two seconds. Founded in San Francisco in 2015, the company has built a modular biometric platform used by banks, hotels, hospitals, and gaming companies across more than 190 countries. Its flagship product, Incode Omni, handles everything from document verification and facial recognition to AML screening and liveness detection, processing more than 100 million user verifications per year. Backed by General Atlantic, SoftBank, J.P. Morgan, and Capital One Ventures at a $1.25 billion valuation, Incode has been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification two consecutive years running.
Wavedash
Wavedash is a San Francisco-based startup (YC X25) that lets players jump into high-end PC games directly in their browser - no launcher, no download, no install. Built on WebAssembly and WebGPU, the platform acts like 'Steam for the web,' giving indie developers a friction-free distribution channel where they keep 90% of revenue. Backed by Floodgate's Mike Maples Jr., Jawed Karim (YouTube co-founder), Griffin Gaming Partners, and Y Combinator, Wavedash launched its public beta in December 2025.