mobile-gaming
(35)
The App Factory That Traded Guitar Strings for Face Yoga
After a billion downloads, Gismart is tuning its consumer-app machine for wellness. The clever part is not any single app - it is the system underneath them.
Stuart Lewis-Smith Put a TV Studio Inside a Bingo App
After two decades in digital entertainment, Stuart Lewis-Smith made an old game feel live again - then turned the unlikely combination of mobile gaming, television production and human banter into a platform.
Vsevolod Leonov Has Spent a Career Moving Toward the Machine Room
He learned the internet through portals, games and partnerships. Now the former Google executive is testing the economics and infrastructure of open-source AI with his own hands.
Peter Sullivan Put the Lottery in Your Pocket. Then He Took the Long Way Out.
A daily detour for his father’s lottery numbers became a 13-year lesson in product design, patient regulation and knowing when to hand over the ticket.
Junyoung Kim Is Teaching a Game Company to Wake Up Before Its Humans
Bagelcode spent a decade turning player behavior into an operating system. Now its co-founder is applying the same experimental instinct to AI agents, tiny teams, and the unruly craft of making games.
Scott Lahman Kept Betting on the Phone's Next Act
From a prescient Nokia meeting to JAMDAT's $680 million exit and textPlus's pending Truecaller deal, Lahman's career is a study in spotting the next job a phone will do - then doing the patient work to make it ordinary.
The Startup That Put a Live TV Game Show Inside Your Bingo App
Most bingo apps are you, alone, tapping a screen. Live Play Mobile added a person on the other end - a real host, live, 24/7 - and turned a card game into appointment television you carry in your pocket.
Ohsnap Broke Its First Hit - Then Built the Hardware Playbook Founders Should Copy
A $466,820 Kickstarter win nearly became a global returns nightmare. Ohsnap paid for the lesson, rebuilt the grip and turned obsessive iteration into a phone-accessory business - and a second act in mobile gaming.
The Gaming Company That Turned a Three-Headed Snake Into a $2 Billion Cult
It started with one gaming mouse and a promise that felt slightly ridiculous - build only for gamers, nobody else. Twenty-plus years later that stubbornness is a hardware empire, a payments business, and a snake logo people tattoo on themselves.
Chip Lange Has Spent Three Decades Making Games Easier to Enter
From a Sega test bench to EA Sports, Origin and HiDef, Chip Lange has kept returning to one practical question: how do you invite more people into play - and give them a reason to stay?
Dream Sports Lost Its Cash Engine. Now It Wants the Rest of the Fan's Day
The company that taught millions of Indians to manage imaginary cricket teams is attempting a harder rebuild: turning one enormous audience into many smaller businesses without the paid contests that once funded the machine.
DraftKings Inc.
DraftKings began with a baseball contest built in a spare bedroom. Fourteen years later, it is a $6 billion test of how deeply a betting interface can be woven into the way America watches sports.
DoubleDown Interactive
The Seattle-born social casino pioneer has spent 16 years selling the feeling of a casino without a cash-out. Its next wager is less visible but more consequential: own more of the checkout, broaden into Europe and make an old hit travel further.
Christian Facey
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Audiomob
Audiomob is a London-founded adtech company that pioneered non-intrusive audio advertising inside mobile games. Its SDK lets game developers earn revenue by playing short audio ads without interrupting gameplay, while advertisers reach a large, hard-to-access mobile gaming audience. Founded in 2020 by ex-Google and ex-Facebook engineers Christian Facey and Wilfrid Obeng, the company reaches hundreds of millions of monthly players across 160 countries and has raised roughly $16 million, including a $14 million Series A at a $110 million valuation.
FunCraft
FunCraft is a remote-first mobile game studio founded in 2019 by former Electronic Arts and Zynga veterans. It builds friendly word and puzzle games - led by flagship title Wordgrams and Word Yatzy - designed to become daily rituals players return to for years. The studio backs a philosophy it calls 'casual forever,' pairing rigorous live operations and ad-spend experimentation with a small, senior team. By its fifth year it had crossed 7 million installs and more than $15 million in revenue.
Onlife
Onlife is a spatial-AI company that turns where people go into what they might do next. It began as the parent company behind Aglet, a location-based 'sneakerverse' game that had players walking real streets to collect virtual sneakers, then used the resulting movement data to build a Spatial Behavioral Engine and a consumer 'Smart Map' that fuses calendars, to-do lists and location into a self-organizing daily planner. Founded by former adidas trends director Ryan David Mullins, Onlife straddles the line between a playful consumer app and a serious geospatial-intelligence platform.
Johnny Monsarrat
Johnny Monsarrat co-invented the MMO genre at Turbine in 1994 - the studio behind Asheron's Call, Lord of the Rings Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online before Warner Bros. acquired it for $160M. Now as founder and CEO of Monsarrat, he is building Landing Party, the world's first outdoor AR roleplaying game, with 7 patents, $2.7M raised, and advisors including the former CEOs of PlayStation and Blizzard.
Gamevice
Gamevice is a Simi Valley, California hardware company that makes attachable gamepad controllers which clamp onto an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone and turn it into a handheld console. Born from the Wikipad gaming tablet project, the company shipped its controller through hundreds of Apple Retail stores, raised a $12.5M Series A in 2017, and built its newer Flex line as an official 'Designed for Xbox' accessory tuned for Xbox Cloud Gaming and other cloud services. It is also known for a long-running patent fight against Nintendo over the Switch's detachable Joy-Con design.
Jake Brooks
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
World Golf Tour
World Golf Tour (WGT) is a San Francisco-based video game company behind WGT Golf, one of the most realistic free-to-play online golf games. Using patented 3D photorealistic georeferencing built from helicopter-shot, high-definition imagery, WGT recreates real-world courses like Pebble Beach, St Andrews and Bethpage Black to within roughly an inch of vertical accuracy. Launched in open beta in 2008, it grew to tens of millions of players across browser, iOS and Android, ran virtual versions of the U.S. Open with the USGA, was acquired by Topgolf in 2016, and spun back out as an independent studio on January 1, 2025.
Triumph
Triumph (Triumph Labs) is a San Francisco company that turns ordinary mobile games into real-money skill tournaments. Its plug-and-play SDK lets developers add cash competitions with a single line of code, while Triumph handles the hard parts behind the scenes: payments, KYC identity checks, state-by-state legal compliance, geolocation, matchmaking, anti-cheat, and payouts. Founded in 2021 by Stanford dropouts Jake Brooks and Jared Geller, the company raised $14.1M (a $10.2M Series A led by General Catalyst plus a $3.9M seed) and also runs its own consumer apps - Triumph Arcade for skill games and Rips for card collectibles.
Phillip Hyun
Phillip Hyun is the CEO of Gamevice, the Simi Valley hardware company (formerly Wikipad) that builds clip-on game controllers for phones and tablets, and the co-founder and vice chairman of the esports organization Gen.G. He has spent a decade running an eight-person hardware shop that has repeatedly taken Nintendo to court over the Switch's detachable controllers, a David-and-Goliath patent fight that reached the Federal Circuit in 2026. A UC Berkeley cognitive science graduate, Hyun has built and sold companies (Enterprise Technology Group to Nexstar Broadcasting), helped launch a top-tier global esports brand, and more recently turned investor in the Italian football club Venezia FC.
Anil Dharni
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Avia (AviaGames)
Avia (formerly AviaGames) is a San Mateo-based mobile gaming company behind Pocket7Games, a skill-based tournament platform where players compete in puzzle, card, bingo, and arcade titles for cash prizes. Founded in 2017 by Vickie Chen and Ping Wang, the company uses algorithmic skill matchmaking and a single-wallet system across a portfolio that includes Solitaire Clash, Bingo Clash, and Bubble Buzz.
LILA Games
LILA Games is a Bengaluru-based mobile game studio founded in 2020 and building Project Black, an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. Backed by a $10M Series A from Rainfall, KRAFTON, Sequoia, BITKRAFT, and Galaxy Interactive, the team is led by former SEGA and FunPlus operators determined to prove India can ship a globally competitive shooter.
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.
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.
Sandy Thomson
Sandy Thomson is the CEO of World Golf Tour (WGT), the long-running online and mobile golf simulation that, on January 1, 2025, separated from Topgolf to operate as an independent company backed by a games-focused growth investor. A McGill computer science graduate who spent his early career programming at BioWare, Eidos Montreal and EA's Visceral Games, Thomson joined WGT/Topgolf as a lead software engineer in 2016 and rose through engineering leadership to become Studio Head of Topgolf Games before taking the top job at the spun-out WGT.
Joseph Kim
Joseph Kim is the CEO and co-founder of LILA Games, a venture-backed mobile game studio headquartered in Bengaluru, India, building Project Black - an ambitious free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile. With a career spanning two decades across Gaia Interactive, FunPlus (King of Avalon), Demiurge Studios, SEGA Networks, and NBCUniversal, Kim brings rare publishing-to-studio expertise to one of gaming's most competitive genres. Backed by $12.8M from BITKRAFT Ventures and top gaming angels, he's on a mission to prove India can be the next great hub for world-class game development.