mobile-entertainment
(4)
Alta Media USA wants your next minute
A TikTok creator network on one side. A short-drama studio and app on the other. Alta Media USA is working on both sides of the same question: what makes somebody stay?
HOLYWATER TECH
HOLYWATER TECH is a Ukrainian-founded, AI-first entertainment company building a mobile-first streaming network for short, vertical, episodic stories. Its ecosystem - My Drama (vertical microdrama series), My Passion (digital books), My Muse (AI-generated series) and Freebits (ad-supported streaming) - has grown to more than 85 million app installs. Founded in Kyiv in 2020 by Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov, the company pairs human creators with AI production tools to turn books into bite-sized vertical series, and in January 2026 raised a $22M round led by Horizon Capital, on top of a strategic investment from Fox Entertainment.
Ben Liu
Ben Liu is the CEO of Pocket Gems, a San Francisco-based mobile entertainment company backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital. After joining as COO in 2011 and becoming CEO in 2012, he has led the company's flagship titles — the interactive storytelling platform Episode (with 25 million+ registered creators) and the real-time 3D strategy game War Dragons — while overseeing $155 million in total fundraising, mostly from Tencent. A Stanford double-degree and MBA graduate, Liu brings a rare hybrid background spanning investment banking, Disney strategy, EA mobile product management, and social gaming before betting on the mobile-first future of entertainment.
Michael Dawson
Michael Dawson is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Storytelling Studio at Pocket Gems, the San Francisco mobile gaming studio behind Episode and War Dragons. With a background spanning management consulting, clean-tech startups, and entrepreneurship, Dawson joined Pocket Gems in 2011 and helped scale it into one of the most successful mobile entertainment companies in the world — overseeing products that have been downloaded over 325 million times and platforms where billions of story episodes have been read. He holds degrees from Yale (Ethics, Politics & Economics) and Stanford (MBA, MS in Environment & Resources), and has become one of the sharper strategic voices in mobile interactive storytelling.