He spent twenty years building games for a billion people. Then he decided the billion should build their own.
Founder & CEO, Jabali.ai · ex-Meta, AWS, Storm8, Zynga, SkillzAsk Vatsal Bhardwaj what Jabali is for and he reaches for an unglamorous comparison. Shipping a game, he says, should feel like posting a short video. No render farm. No 40-person studio. No three-year roadmap. Type an idea, watch it become playable, hand it to a friend. That is the whole pitch, and it is a strange thing to hear from someone who spent two decades inside the machinery that made games hard in the first place.
Jabali.ai, founded in 2023 in Los Altos and co-founded with Arnav Jhala, is a no-code, generative-AI game engine. Creators describe what they want in plain language - narrative, environments, visuals, the behavior of a non-player character - and the system assembles it. The company calls the result Jabali Studio, and it offers two front doors: Vibe Code, for people who think in mechanics, and Design Mode, for people who think in pictures. Both support 2D and 3D. In late 2025 Jabali claimed a prompt could become a playable game in under ten minutes.
The architecture is deliberately undogmatic. Jabali is, in Bhardwaj's phrase, LLM-agnostic and context-first - it routes each task to whichever frontier model is best for it, pulling on Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, and Grok rather than betting the company on any single one. The reasoning is partly technical and partly philosophical: lock yourself to one model and you inherit its blind spots, including the dreaded sameness that makes AI-made things look like they came off the same conveyor belt.
In March 2024 the company announced a $5M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with Sapphire Ventures and the Sony Innovation Fund. For a generative-AI gaming startup that is not a headline number, and Bhardwaj does not pretend otherwise. What he keeps returning to is restraint. "Growth without quality is unsustainable," he told one interviewer, and the line reads less like a slogan than like a warning to himself.
Games are the richest canvas for self-expression. Making them is still too hard and too expensive.
There is a tidy irony to his resume. In 2004, at Microsoft, Bhardwaj wrote the first Bluetooth software to ship in the Windows operating system and was nominated to the Bluetooth SIG board. Two decades before "agentic" was a word anyone used, his undergraduate research at Gujarat University was on artificial neural networks for character recognition. He has been circling AI and the plumbing of consumer technology his whole career - it just took the rest of the field a while to catch up.
What followed was a tour through nearly every layer of the games business. Corporate strategy at Zynga, helping position the company for mobile, international expansion, and its IPO. Running Studios at Storm8 as head of a 200-plus person team, launching more than twenty games, crossing a billion downloads, and watching the company sell for $400M. Product in virtual reality at Meta's Oculus, where the App Store he helped build went on to generate more than $1.5B. General Manager of Games Technology and Simulations at AWS, where he founded game-publishing services and launched the Open 3D initiative with the Linux Foundation. Chief Product Officer at the public company Skillz, leading teams north of 250 people.
Add it up the way his own site does and the totals are almost comic: roughly $3B in cumulative revenue, a billion-plus customers, six cloud services, more than a thousand people led, over two hundred experiments run, twenty-plus startup investments. He has been the operator inside the big company and the strategist in the war room. Jabali is the first time he is the one holding the whole thing.
Engineered the first Bluetooth software in the Windows OS; nominated to the Bluetooth SIG board.
Corporate strategy positioning the company for mobile, international growth, and a public listing.
Led 200+ people, launched 20+ games past 1B downloads and $150M+ revenue; company sold for $400M.
Product leadership in VR; helped create the Oculus App Store - $1.5B+ in cumulative revenue.
Founded game-publishing services; launched the Open 3D initiative with the Linux Foundation.
Led 250+ person product and technology teams at the public company.
Co-founded the AI game engine in Los Altos with Arnav Jhala.
Jabali.ai exists to make shipping a game feel like posting a short video.
AI is moving from assistive to co-creative: ideation, assets and code, prototyping, personalisation, QA.
We're LLM-agnostic and context-first - we select the best frontier models per task.
AI is designed to augment, not replace, human creativity.
Game creation has long been limited by the complexity of tools and the need for large technical teams.
Smaller studios and independent creators can now leverage AI to compete with large enterprises.
He wrote the first Bluetooth software shipped in Windows - in 2004. The wireless handshake on millions of machines started partly with him.
His undergrad research was a neural network for character recognition. He was doing AI before AI was cool, then went to do everything else.
Games he has worked on have been played by more than a billion people. Jabali is his bet that the next billion will make their own.
Jabali is model-agnostic on purpose - it picks the best frontier AI per task rather than marrying one. A hedge against AI sameness.
He ran the MIT Innovation Club as president while earning his MBA. The instinct to organize builders showed up early.
His backers read like a games-industry handshake: Bitkraft for the conviction, Sapphire for the scale, Sony for the pedigree.
AI is designed to augment, not replace, human creativity.