Arimac Digital is a full-stack digital product engineering company founded in Sri Lanka in 2011 and now operating out of Colombo, Dubai and beyond. It builds enterprise-grade web, mobile, AI, immersive and robotics products for global brands across fintech, telecom, aviation and consumer sectors - clients include Emirates, Etihad, Coca-Cola, Tesco, Visa and Ooredoo. With 400+ specialists, 850+ solutions delivered and a claimed 330 million+ digital lives reached, Arimac positions itself as one of South Asia's leading engineering-led digital studios, and made headlines building Diyazen, Sri Lanka's first humanoid robot.
Sankar (Jay) Jayaram is the co-founder and CEO of Quintar, a Santa Clara startup building augmented reality experiences for live sports. A former Washington State University engineering professor who founded the school's virtual reality lab in 1994, he co-founded VOKE with his wife Uma Jayaram, sold it to Intel in 2016, and served as CTO of Intel Sports before spinning out Quintar in 2021. Quintar became the official AR developer for the PGA Tour and shipped PGA Tour Vision for Apple Vision Pro.
Shubham Mishra is the co-founder and Global CEO of Pixis, a Burlingame, California company building codeless AI infrastructure that lets marketers deploy AI models without writing code. He dropped out of BITS Pilani to build a virtual reality headset with the startup Absentia, then pivoted into AI-driven marketing and grew Pixis from an early bet on AI to roughly $85M in ARR, raising $209M across its funding rounds. His pitch is consistent: strip the friction out of AI so any team can use it in minutes, not months.
Steve Arnold is the CEO of E-Line Media, the video game developer and publisher behind the BAFTA- and Peabody-winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Beyond Blue, and the upcoming Never Alone 2 and Neighborhoods. He has been making games professionally since 2003, starting at Electronic Arts, where he rose from production intern on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series to Executive Producer working across EA Partners and the Origin store, with credits on Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band and Alice: Madness Returns. In May 2014 he joined Oculus, becoming Head of Oculus Studios in June 2016 and running the company's first-party and partner content slate through November 2019, a period covering Lone Echo, Robo Recall, The Climb, Chronos and Journey of the Gods, with partnerships spanning Epic, Insomniac, Ubisoft, Marvel and Lucasfilm. He then founded his own studio, Imagination Games, and ToyChest.AI, an early-stage venture using computer vision to let ordinary physical toys unlock content in games without special hardware. At E-Line he now leads a studio whose work sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has reached more than 25 million players.
Emperia is a London-based immersive commerce platform that lets brands and retailers build browser-based, cross-device virtual stores that blend e-commerce accessibility with gaming-style engagement. Founded in 2019 by Olga Dogadkina and Simonas Holcmann, its no-code, SaaS platform has powered virtual retail spaces for Dior, Bloomingdale's, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss and Christie's, reporting sharply higher conversion versus traditional online storefronts.
Vivid Vision is a San Francisco medical technology company that turns virtual reality headsets into tools for vision care. Founded in 2014 by programmer James Blaha, who built the first prototype to treat his own lazy eye, the company started with VR games for amblyopia and strabismus and now runs two lines: a clinical and at-home vision therapy suite used in clinics across 50+ countries, and Vivid Vision Perimetry (VVP), a VR-based visual field test being adopted as a digital endpoint in pharmaceutical clinical trials for glaucoma, AMD, and geographic atrophy.
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.
Inspirit is a Palo Alto-based education technology company building a spatial-computing platform that brings virtual and augmented reality into STEM, career, and workforce learning. Its no-login library of 270+ interactive 3D models and simulations runs across VR headsets like Meta Quest and Pico as well as ordinary Chromebook browsers, letting teachers and trainers plan, run, and track immersive lessons without heavy hardware budgets. Founded by Stanford Graduate School of Education researchers, Inspirit grounds its content in learning science and is used across hundreds of school districts and, increasingly, in workforce and justice-reentry programs.
Plympton is a literary studio that reinvents how fiction is written, distributed, and read in the digital age. Founded in 2011 by journalist Jennifer 8. Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love, the company borrows the Hollywood development model - working with authors from the idea stage - and applies it to serialized fiction, short stories, and experimental formats. Plympton launched the first Kindle Serials for Amazon, acquired the email-serialization pioneer DailyLit, built the curated reading app Rooster, crowdsourced fresh covers for public-domain classics, curated Amazon Original Stories collections, put free short fiction on the NYC subway, and adapted literature into virtual reality.
Pressman Film is a Los Angeles-based independent production company founded in 1969 by the late producer Edward R. Pressman and now led by his son, CEO Sam Pressman. With more than 100 motion pictures to its name - including Badlands, Conan the Barbarian, Wall Street, The Crow and American Psycho - the company has a long history of backing risky, director-driven cinema before the rest of Hollywood catches on. Today it is expanding into television, virtual-reality storytelling (the Cate Blanchett/Terrence Malick VR piece Evolver), stage work and experimental, blockchain-enabled film financing that lets everyday fans invest in its development slate.
Tesseract (Jio Tesseract) is an MIT Media Lab spin-off and Jio Platforms/Reliance Industries subsidiary building India's mixed reality stack: consumer devices like the JioDive VR headset (Rs 1,299), JioGlass smart glasses, and JioFrames AI glasses, plus enterprise XR platforms for training and remote assistance. Founded in 2015 by Kshitij Marwah, acquired 92.7% by Reliance in May 2019, it calls itself India's biggest XR and AI company, reaching 50+ million consumers and 50+ enterprise clients.

Kul Wadhwa is the CEO and founder of BeyondView, a San Francisco proptech company building photorealistic digital twins and game-like walkthroughs for commercial real estate. Before BeyondView, he spent six years at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he ran business development and mobile and launched Wikipedia Zero, bringing free Wikipedia access to over half a billion people in 22 developing-world countries.
Aditya Vishwanath is the co-founder and CEO of Inspirit, a Palo Alto edtech company that brings virtual and augmented reality into middle and high school STEM classrooms. A Georgia Tech computer scientist turned Stanford learning-sciences PhD, he built Inspirit to be the bridge between cutting-edge academic research and the everyday teacher. Before Inspirit he co-founded MakerGhat, a network of makerspaces for youth in low-income Mumbai neighborhoods. He is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Schmidt Futures Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in education.
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.
Raphael Certain is the founder and CEO of Clarity, a Franco-American neurotechnology company building a wearable virtual-reality headset that delivers personalized light and sound stimulation at gamma frequencies to support the aging brain. A self-taught entrepreneur who pivoted from marine biology to neurophysiology, he turned a master's thesis at the Neurodegenerative Diseases Institute in Bordeaux into a venture-backed company. By 24 he had raised more than $1.3 million, assembled an international team of 20-plus people across Paris and San Francisco, and built partnerships with leading universities in the US and UK.
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.
Chris O'Dowd is the co-founder and CEO of WIN Reality, an Austin-based virtual reality training platform for baseball and softball hitters. A former professional catcher who played six seasons in the minor leagues after starring at Dartmouth, he built WIN Reality with his father, longtime MLB executive Dan O'Dowd, to close the gap between practice speed and real game speed. The Meta Quest-based product lets players face game-speed pitching from a library of thousands of real pitchers, and is now used by youth players, more than 200 colleges, and a majority of MLB franchises. The company raised a $45M+ round led by Spectrum Equity in June 2022.
Darshan Shankar is the founder and CEO of Bigscreen, the VR company that started as a social movie theater you could share with strangers and grew into a hardware maker shipping the Bigscreen Beyond, billed as the world's smallest VR headset. A self-described VR obsessive and UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he sold his first Y Combinator startup before turning the whole company toward virtual reality in 2014. Today Bigscreen builds quarter-pound headsets with custom 3D-scanned facepads and OLED microdisplays, ships to eight regions, and is on track to cross $100M in annual revenue.
zSpace builds headset-free augmented and virtual reality learning systems that let students hold and manipulate lifelike 3D objects on a laptop or all-in-one screen using a stylus and head-tracking glasses. The platform powers STEM and career-and-technical-education programs - from dissecting a virtual frog to wiring a circuit or exploring human anatomy - in thousands of U.S. school districts and 50-plus countries. Founded in 2007 as Infinite Z and renamed zSpace in 2013, the San Jose company went public on the Nasdaq in December 2024 under the ticker ZSPC.
WIN Reality is an Austin-based sports technology company that turns the Meta Quest headset into a virtual batting cage. Founded in 2018 by former Colorado Rockies GM Dan O'Dowd and his son, ex-pro player Chris O'Dowd, the company lets baseball and softball hitters take game-speed reps against a library of nearly two million real pitches from more than 7,000 pitchers - plus AI swing analysis through a phone. Its mission is to democratize professional-grade training, putting the same tools used by most MLB franchises into the hands of youth, travel-ball, high school and college players.
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.
Kaon Interactive is a Maynard, Massachusetts B2B software company that builds interactive 3D product demonstrations, augmented and virtual reality experiences, and value-storytelling applications that help large enterprises explain complex products to self-directed buyers. Its patented, AI-assisted Content Experience Platform unifies marketing, sales enablement, and buyer engagement so that the same product story works on a trade-show floor, a sales call, or a buyer's late-night research session - on any device. Customers include GE Healthcare, IBM, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Rockwell Automation, and Baker Hughes.
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.
Gavin Finn is the President and CEO of Kaon Interactive, the Maynard, Massachusetts software company whose interactive 3D, augmented reality, and virtual reality applications help the world's largest B2B enterprises tell complex product stories. An MIT-trained engineer who got hooked on artificial intelligence in grad school, he has run Kaon since 2005, teaches the next generation of leaders at the Tufts Gordon Institute, mentors and invests in startups, and was named CEO Forum Magazine's Transformative CEO of the Year in 2020.
Scott Xiao is the co-founder and CEO of Luminopia, a Boston-area digital therapeutics company whose lead product turns watching cartoons in a VR headset into an FDA-approved treatment for amblyopia, the leading cause of vision loss in children. He left Harvard with classmate Dean Travers to build the first VR-based therapeutic ever cleared by the FDA, partnering with Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and DreamWorks for content and with Boston Children's Hospital and MIT for the science.
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.

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 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.
Mursion is a San Francisco-based AI-powered upskilling platform that uses live human 'simulation specialists' to puppet AI avatars in immersive role-play scenarios. Founded in 2015 by Mark Atkinson and Arjun Nagendran, the company trains leaders, salespeople, teachers and healthcare workers in the high-stakes conversations that are hardest to rehearse in real life.
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.