Tagged: metaverse
29 results
3i Inc.
3i Inc. is a Seoul-based spatial AI company that turns physical spaces into interactive digital twins. Founded in 2017, it operates two brands: Beamo, an enterprise digital twin platform used to remotely inspect and manage mission-critical facilities like data centers and factories, and Pivo, a consumer AI-powered auto-tracking pod for content creators. Backed by a $24M Series A led by SV Investment, the company holds dozens of technology patents in computer vision, 3D scanning, and SLAM.
Ken Kim
Ken Kim is the co-founder and CEO of 3i Inc., a Seoul-based spatial AI company behind Beamo, an enterprise digital twin platform that 3D-scans indoor sites in minutes, and Pivo, an auto-tracking smart pod loved by video creators. A former IT consultant and commodities trader turned repeat entrepreneur, Kim built 3i around a childhood obsession with cameras and a belief that anyone should be able to capture the physical world and move it into the digital one. Under his leadership 3i raised an oversubscribed $24M Series A in 2021, grew to a global team spanning more than 20 nationalities, and holds dozens of technology patents.
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.
HiDef, Inc.
HiDef, Inc. is a San Diego-based mobile game studio building social, creative-first games aimed at players of all backgrounds. Founded in 2019 by interactive-entertainment veterans - including game designer Jace Hall, industry operator Anthony Castoro, three-time NBA champion Rick Fox, and former Obama aide Dr. David Washington - the company launched publicly in 2021 with $9M in funding and a mission to make games with meaningful social impact. HiDef partnered with Unity to power its titles and with Snap Inc. to build a Bitmoji-based dance-and-music social game.
Upland
Upland (Uplandme, Inc.) is a blockchain-based metaverse game that maps virtual properties onto real-world addresses, letting players buy, sell, develop and trade digital real estate as NFTs. Founded in 2018 and launched in 2019 on the EOS blockchain, it blends Monopoly-style property trading with city building, a player-driven economy, and its own tokens (UPX and the ERC-20 Sparklet). Backed by $27M in funding led by Animoca Brands, the Mountain View company has grown to 3M+ registered wallets and partnerships with brands such as FIFA and the NFL Players Association.
Olga Dogadkina
Olga Dogadkina is the co-founder and CEO of Emperia, a London-based immersive commerce platform that builds virtual stores and 3D brand experiences for the world's biggest luxury and retail names, including Dior, Burberry, Bloomingdale's, Tommy Hilfiger, Harrods, Lacoste, Christie's and Dom Pérignon. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Retail & Ecommerce list in 2025, she started Emperia in 2018 after trying VR for the first time on a Microsoft fashion project and deciding it would change the way people shop.
Treasury
Treasury is a San Francisco startup building a registry and discovery system for the world's most valuable spatial assets - architecture, film sets, real estate, monuments, experiential art and nature scans. Co-founded with Zaha Hadid Architects and Spaceform, it protects and distributes the work of spatial creators in the age of spatial computing and generative AI, letting builders license premium 3D environments while letting creators fingerprint their work, track licensed use, and get paid for the 'design DNA' that trains the next generation of AI.
John Manoochehri
John Manoochehri is the Founder and CEO of Treasury, a San Francisco-based registry and discovery system for the world's most valuable spatial assets - from architectural designs and film sets to real estate and world monuments. An architect and environmental scientist with an Oxford degree in ancient languages, he co-founded Treasury with Zaha Hadid Architects and Spaceform in 2022, securing backing from Google's AI fund Gradient Ventures. Before Treasury, he wrote policy frameworks for UNEP and WWF, ran a sustainable design firm working on Sweden's Kiruna city relocation, and launched Last Meter - an architectural tech company integrating circular consumption into real estate. He hosts two podcasts: Resource Talks and Futureperfect Talks (Epic Games-sponsored), and has taught architecture at KTH Stockholm.
Brelyon
Brelyon is an MIT Media Lab spin-out building headset-free immersive displays. Its Ultra Reality monitors use patented wavefront and light-field engineering to project a curved, multi-focal virtual image up to 122 inches with a ~110-degree field of view from a desktop-sized frame, giving users the depth and scale of VR without a headset. Brelyon targets simulation and training, control centers, teleoperations, enterprise visualization and high-end gaming.
Ali Merchant
Ali Merchant is the founder and CEO of iQ3Connect, a Woburn, Massachusetts company building a web-based, ultrafast XR platform that lets enterprise teams step into shared 3D spaces for design review and training straight from a browser - no heavy installs, no specialized hardware required. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer with a Ph.D. in turbomachinery, he spent two decades building high-performance 3D design and simulation software for aerospace before turning a decade-plus of MIT research into a platform that aims to make immersive 3D as easy to build as a slide deck and as collaborative as a video call.
Ryan Mullins
Ryan David Mullins is the co-founder and CEO of Onlife, a Los Angeles spatial-AI company building a Smart Map powered by a proprietary Spatial Behavior Engine. He is best known for creating Aglet, the location-based sneaker game that grew to roughly 4 million players by getting people to walk in the real world to collect virtual kicks. A former Director of Future Trends at Adidas and a serial founder (oolipo, readfy), Mullins blends product building with public writing on technology, philosophy and theology - styling himself an entrepreneur-philosopher who chases what he calls the Prometheus Principle.
Vishal Punwani
Vishal Punwani is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, a generative-AI virtual workplace platform born at Harvard's Innovation Labs. A medical doctor turned founder, he traded clinical medicine and a stint at the World Health Organization for the question of how distributed teams keep a culture alive when nobody shares a hallway. He and his two co-founders, who first met playing World of Warcraft as teenagers, set out to borrow what video games solved decades ago - presence, spontaneity, belonging - and bring it to remote work. In October 2021 the company raised a $15M seed round led by Talis Capital, counting Tinder among its early customers.
Samuel Smith
Samuel 'Sam' Smith is the CEO of Gather, the spatial virtual-office platform for distributed teams. He joined in mid-2022 as a data scientist after falling for the product on an office visit, rose to Head of Data and Business Analytics, and was named CEO in April 2026 when founders Phillip Wang, Mohammed Kumail Jaffer and Jinen Kamdar handed over the reins. A Denver-based data person turned chief executive, he is steering an independent, non-venture-backed Gather back to its roots: spontaneous conversations, customizable rooms, pets, and the small delightful details that make remote work feel less remote.
Splash
Splash is an Australian AI-music company that turns Roblox players into music makers and performers. Founded in Brisbane in 2017 by ex-Twitter alumni, it builds proprietary AI for text-to-singing, generative composition and voice transfer, then wraps that tech inside games and apps where Gen Z and Alpha fans create, remix and perform tracks live. Its flagship Roblox world, Splash: Skate & Music, has surpassed 480 million visits, and the company is led by CEO Tracy Chan, formerly of SoundCloud, Twitch, Spotify and YouTube.
Bigscreen VR
Bigscreen VR is a California-based virtual reality company that started in 2014 as a social app for watching movies, gaming, and hanging out in shared virtual rooms, then pivoted into hardware with the Bigscreen Beyond - marketed as the world's smallest VR headset. Built for enthusiasts, the Beyond uses high-resolution micro-OLED displays, custom pancake optics, and a face cushion molded to each customer's face. The company sells direct to PC VR users who want maximum visual clarity and comfort without the bulk of mainstream headsets.
Provenonce, Inc.
Provenonce, Inc. is a Silicon Valley company building AI-native go-to-market (GTM) infrastructure. Originally launched in 2021 as the virtual-reality metaverse platform NFT Oasis, the company pivoted into agentic AI as generative models matured. Its current platform deploys a coordinated team of semi-sentient AI agents - Sage, Minerva, Glyph, and Logos - that handle lead prioritization, outreach, messaging, and visual content for revenue teams. Founded and led by serial entrepreneur Will O'Brien (ex-BitGo co-founder, ex-Big Fish Games), Provenonce has raised $4.4M and counts Tony Robbins among its advisors and investors.
Dongsoo Han
Dongsoo Han is the founder and CEO of z-emotion, a 3D garment simulation company building software that lets fashion brands design, fit, and render clothing entirely in 3D. A computer graphics engineer with 25+ years in simulation and gaming, he built the hair physics that became AMD's TressFX, the first playable real-time hair in a video game (Tomb Raider). He later realized a thread in 3D space moves much like a strand of hair, and turned that insight into z-emotion's products z-weave, z-fit, z-maya, and zeavric, used in projects with brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike.
Gather
Gather is a virtual workspace where remote teams can see each other, walk up for spontaneous conversations, and collaborate without scheduling a meeting for everything. Often described as 'Minecraft meets Zoom,' it pairs a customizable 2-D world with spatial audio and video, plus AI meeting notes and async chat. Founded in 2020 and backed by Sequoia and Index, Gather has been used by millions of people for work, conferences, weddings and gatherings.
Meta
Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
Will O'Brien
Will O'Brien is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the CEO and co-founder of NFT Oasis, the metaverse platform owned and operated by Provenonce, Inc. A blockchain and gaming veteran, he co-founded and led Bitcoin security pioneer BitGo (later acquired by Galaxy Digital for $1.2B) and was named Bitcoin industry 'CEO of the Year' in 2014. Before that he ran corporate development at Big Fish Games and held operating roles at Keen IO and TrialPay. He has backed 70-plus early-stage startups, holds a Harvard computer science degree and an MIT Sloan MBA, and moonlights as an improvisational pianist.
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.
Linden Lab
Linden Lab is the San Francisco company behind Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. More than two decades on, the platform still runs a multimillion-dollar creator economy where residents design avatars, sell virtual goods, host live events and trade in Linden Dollars - a quiet, persistent metaverse that predates the word itself.
Bradford Oberwager
Bradford Oberwager is the Executive Chairman of Linden Lab and CEO of Tilia, the fintech arm powering Second Life's virtual economy. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold companies in personalized vitamins, healthy snacks (Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo), and labor technology (Jyve, acquired by Advantage Solutions), Oberwager led the 2020 acquisition of Linden Lab alongside investor Randy Waterfield. Since then he has staked $35 million on securing money transmitter licenses in all U.S. states to enable real-money payouts from Second Life's Linden dollar economy, grown monthly active users to 600,000, and championed a mobile-forward future for the world's original metaverse.
Graham Gaylor
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
VRChat Inc.
VRChat is a free-to-use social virtual reality platform where millions of people gather every month inside worlds built almost entirely by the community. Founded in 2014 by Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey, the company has turned a Reddit-recruited Oculus DK1 experiment into one of the largest user-generated virtual worlds on the internet, with concurrent users routinely topping 100,000 and a creator economy now monetized through a digital currency, subscriptions, and a marketplace.
Luke Day
Luke Day is Co-founder and General Partner at MAGIC Fund, a $30M seed-stage venture firm built on the conviction that the best founders want money from people who've built things themselves. Focused on gaming, metaverse, and sports investments, Day came up through engineering recruiting at Discord and Roblox before co-founding one of the few truly decentralized VC funds - a 12-partner, multi-continent operation where each GP invests autonomously from their own domain expertise. MAGIC Fund's portfolio spans 250+ startups across 30+ countries with one unicorn (Retool) and a reported 5x return on its debut fund.
Matt Lee
Matt Lee is the Founder and General Partner of Progression Fund, a pre-seed and seed-stage consumer technology VC firm co-founded with alumni from musical.ly and TikTok. Based in Oakland, California, he backs visionary founders building AI-native products for everyday consumers and prosumers, with a particular thesis around generational behavior shifts - specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha. His portfolio spans consumer tech, gaming, entertainment, social platforms, live streaming commerce, and digital health, with notable investments including Perplexity AI and Dapper Labs. He brings a global perspective from prior roles at ChinaRock Capital Management, Pereg Ventures, and engineering and consulting stints at Macquarie Group and Capco.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Amy Pritchard
Amy Pritchard is the founder and CEO of ModSquad, a global leader in outsourced digital engagement services. A former commercial litigator, she launched the company in 2007 inside a virtual bar in Second Life with four colleagues - their first gig was guarding Newt Gingrich's avatar. Today ModSquad runs 10,000+ independent contractors across 70 countries, serving clients from the NFL to the U.S. Department of State with customer support, content moderation, trust and safety, and community management - blending agentic AI with high-EQ human expertise.