Click a link. You're playing.
The web browser just became the world's most powerful gaming platform. Wavedash is why.
The average PC game install is 50GB. The average player attention span at that install screen is about 15 seconds. That gap - between wanting to play and actually playing - is where Wavedash was born.
The idea is disarmingly simple: what if a game was just a URL? Click it, and you're in. No launcher required. No patch to download at 11pm. No arguing with your operating system. Just the game, running at full quality in whatever browser tab you have open.
"Click a link and you're playing."- Kyler Blue, Co-Founder & CEO
Wavedash makes this happen by building on two of the most significant advances in browser technology: WebAssembly, which lets native code run at near-native speed in the browser, and WebGPU, which finally gives the web direct access to GPU hardware. The result is that high-end PC games - not Flash-era web games, but actual Unity, Godot, and Unreal titles - can run inside Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge without any special plugins or platform requirements.
The company emerged from Y Combinator's Spring 2025 (X25) batch, raised $4.3 million in December 2025, launched its public beta the same month, and has been signing up developers ever since. The pitch to studios is hard to argue with: publish once, reach every browser, on every device, with zero installation friction - and keep 90 cents of every dollar you earn.
The Wavedash team is small but has a specific kind of resume: each founder has shipped a consumer product that millions of people actually used.
Was employee number one at Tenor, the GIF search engine that Google acquired. Built the product from scratch and designed the GIF Keyboard that billions of people use inside iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack without knowing his name. If you've ever sent a GIF, Kyler's fingerprints are on it.
ex-Tenor (Google)A serial founder who has already navigated the full cycle. Started Rhythmm (YC W18), then built Sesh - a social music platform that got acquired by GoFundMe. The engineering backbone of Wavedash and someone who understands what it takes to build, launch, and exit.
ex-Sesh (GoFundMe)Built DefendTheHouse, a gaming YouTube channel that grew to 700,000 subscribers. Knows the game community from the inside. Adds production expertise from stints at Snapchat and BuzzFeed, with VFX credits in film and television. The person on the team who knows why players actually play.
DefendTheHouse (700k YouTube)A GIF keyboard builder, a GoFundMe-acquired founder, and a 700k-subscriber YouTube gamer walk into a browser. The punchline is $4.3 million and a public beta.
Games run natively - not streamed from a remote server - directly in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Desktop, tablet, and mobile. WebAssembly handles the code; WebGPU handles the graphics.
Share a link to spin up a multiplayer lobby. Your friend doesn't need an account. They don't need to install anything. They click, they join. That's it.
A CLI tool and Developer Portal to publish games with minimal code changes. Supports Unity, Godot, Unreal, and Three.js. Documentation at docs.wavedash.com.
Hosting, distribution, cloud saves, achievements, and analytics. All the boring infrastructure a game studio needs so they can focus on making the game.
The economics of game distribution have been set by Valve for two decades. Wavedash comes in with a different math.
| Platform | Developer Cut | No Download | Browser Native | Any Device |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam | 70% | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Epic Games Store | 88% | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| itch.io | ~90% | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Wavedash | 90% | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Revenue splits are approximate and based on standard base tiers. Steam's 70% cut applies to the first $10M in sales.
Led by Floodgate's Mike Maples Jr., with participation from Y Combinator and a roster of investors who know exactly what frictionless media distribution looks like when it works.
Jawed Karim co-founded YouTube and uploaded its very first video in 2005. That company was built on a single premise: media should be instantly accessible in a browser without downloading anything.
When Karim invests in Wavedash, he's backing the same thesis again - this time applied to games rather than video. The pattern recognition here is not subtle.
Mike Maples Jr. at Floodgate has a track record of identifying platform shifts early. His portfolio has included Twitter, Twitch, and several other companies that redefined how people spend time online.
Jawed Karim - the man who uploaded "Me at the zoo," the first video ever posted to YouTube in April 2005 - is a Wavedash investor. His career arc: built instant video in the browser, then backed instant games in the browser.
Kyler Blue designed the GIF Keyboard at Tenor - the feature that puts a GIF search engine inside your phone's keyboard. If you've texted a GIF in the last decade, that's his work. He then decided the same frictionless principle should apply to playing games.
Matt Portner built a 700,000-subscriber YouTube gaming channel before becoming a startup founder. He knows what game communities actually care about from years of sitting inside one.
The 90/10 revenue split beats Steam's standard 70/30 deal. It's competitive with Epic's 88% offer but with a key difference: Wavedash games need no download, so a player in a coffee shop on a school laptop can play the same title as someone on a gaming rig.
George Kennedy's previous company, Sesh, was a music startup that got acquired by GoFundMe. Not an obvious connection - but GoFundMe was building social community features and Sesh was building social listening infrastructure. Startups find buyers in unexpected places.