social-gaming
(5)
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.
Sleeper
Sleeper is a social-first fantasy sports and gaming platform that lets friends draft, trade, chat, and compete across the NFL, NBA, soccer, esports and more, all inside one mobile app. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Las Vegas, Sleeper grew to millions of active users with zero ad spend by treating fantasy sports as a place to hang out with friends rather than a transactional web tool. It has since expanded into daily fantasy 'Picks' and prediction markets.
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.
BEAT THE BOMB
BEAT THE BOMB is an immersive social entertainment company that turns teamwork into a real-life video game. Squads of four to six players suit up in hazmat gear and battle through a series of high-tech, motion- and touch-driven game rooms - dodging lasers, cracking codes, and racing a Bomb Clock. Fail the final mission and you get blasted with paint, foam, or slime. Founded in Brooklyn in 2017 by former Tough Mudder executive Alex Patterson, the company has grown into a national chain backed by $22M in venture funding, hosting corporate outings, school groups, and birthday parties across multiple U.S. cities.
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.