Gaming Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2025

Live data powers everything we do—from our global, multiplayer mobile games to our mobile ad buying to our live data ecosystem, Satori. MZ is creating new futures for people, enterprises, cities, and countries. The possibilities are endless.

OMGPOP is a leading developer of social games for facebook, iphone and the open web. With games on multiple social networks as well as its own destination site, the company is recognized as a leader in creating real-time game experiences. Based in New York City, OMGPOP is funded by Spark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Nitrode is an AI game development engine designed to transform your gaming experience. Whether you're an aspiring game developer or a passionate gamer, Nitrode empowers you to effortlessly build, launch, and play your favorite games. Leveraging AI, Nitrode streamlines the game creation and launching process, allowing creators to focus on their vision without getting bogged down by mechanics or technical complexities.

Glade is revolutionizing gaming with AI-driven worlds. Our debut title, Cursed Crown, is an anime-inspired multiplayer ARPG set in Alder, where players bridge cultural divides between fractured regions, guided by a deep narrative and responsive AI characters. Unite Alder, explore its mysteries, and restore harmony through cultural understanding.

Lovable for Minecraft Mods. Empowering over 100,000 players to become creators.

✨ Hello! ✨ - StartPlaying.Games is the largest marketplace for finding game masters to host digital tabletop games like D&D. Today, more than 40 million people play D&D around the world and sales have grown by double-digit percentages for the last five consecutive years. But still finding people to host and play these games with is challenging. Most solutions involve digging through discord servers, reddit, and specialty forums. We built StartPlaying.Games to solve this problem.

GamerPay is a marketplace for trading gaming skins and assets without scams. We do this by integrating with games to instantly validate all trades. We launched 3 months ago and transacted 245.000 dollars growing 30% MoM. Talking to 5.000 gamers we learned that 46% have been scammed more than once. Over half are minors, who are stuck trading for cash on social media due to their age. We are the first to build a fully compliant system for parental consent, enabling the majority of gamers to trade legally and giving the parents peace of mind. There are 215 million trades annually in games we support. We make 7 dollars on average per trade. So a $1.5B initial market, growing fast alongside gaming and blockchain game economies. The team behind previously co-founded the largest transactional marketplace for secondhand high end clothes in Denmark, with 1 million users and a yearly transacted GMV north of $40 million.

Sagaland is a platform for open-ended AI games.

Hypercard for iPad. Allows non-technical people to create media rich interactive apps like mobile games then publish them to the App store as native apps with out writing a single line of code.

Better Opinions is a prediction market of India which allows users to trade their opinion on everyday topics. For example, If you think India Covid cases will decrease by 10% this week, you can trade this insight and win money if correct. Our aim is to make the app inclusive for all. The stock market unfortunately can be very technical and opaque and therefore isn’t always accessible for all. However, when we start allowing trading in categories such as cricket, politics and entertainment, not only do we make trading more relatable, but we also help improve their financial literacy.

Blue Frog Gaming

Here at Spellbrush, we're passionate about making a good anime game. We also happen to be the world's leading generative AI studio — we're the team behind niji・journey. We are currently investigating how AI can be used to help human artists perform masterpieces in the most complex medium of our times: video games. Our games are characterized by a no-compromise approach to well-balanced gameplay married to a truthful love of visual arts.

Volley builds the best voice AI games and entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa, smartphones, and TVs. Popular Volley voice games include “Song Quiz”, “Jeopardy!”, and “The Price Is Right”. Our voice apps are used by millions of people every month. We believe voice control will become the main way people access entertainment in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and cars, and our goal is to become the "Netflix of Voice" for this emerging category of devices. Volley was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman in 2016. We're a hybrid remote/in-person company, headquartered in San Francisco.

BeeBettor makes sports betting simple. Currently, sports bettors download more than 40 sports betting apps to get the full experience. At each one, they must go through a long KYC process. Then once their 40 accounts are active and funded, finding the best price is a painstaking process involving third-party tools to search available offers. BeeBettor aggregates all these accounts into one app and automatically gives sports bettors the best price.

DreamWorld is a next-gen Minecraft with generative AI building. A game and platform for 3D user generated content, DreamWorld is a digital world with one of the largest multiplayer capacities ever developed. Our players grew up on User Generated Content games, but are now 13-40 and have aged out Roblox / Minecraft. DreamWorld provides more powerful building tools, better graphics, and massive social multiplayer.

Miniswap a marketplace for the $20B tabletop games market, starting with Warhammer. In hobbies as complex as Warhammer, finding what you want on general marketplaces is a huge pain. Filters don't work, free-form listings mean that products are regularly misidentified, and piles of counterfeit junk crowd search results. Miniswap saves hobbyists from this chaos with its catalogue of more than 14,000 unique miniatures. Sellers match their listings against Miniswap's catalogue giving buyers more information and structure as they shop. The global market for tabletop games is estimated to be worth $20B in 2025 and Warhammer alone is projected to grow to $3B by 2030. By capturing the market in this untapped niche, Miniswap is strongly positioned to expand its wedge into adjacent categories, bringing greater transparency, simplicity, and connectivity into additional tabletop games and collectibles verticals. Miniswap's founding team merges deep domain knowledge with elite programming expertise and years of experience in business consulting and startups. Co-founders Zak and Will met while studying together at Cambridge, bonded over their love of Warhammer, and have been best friends ever since.

Players’ Lounge enables gamers of all skill levels to bet on the outcome of their video game matches and win money. Our mission at Players’ Lounge is to give gamers a monetary return on their gaming time, while adding a new layer of fun and entertainment. We have raised $15m in funding. Investors include: ycombinator, Samsung, Griffin Gaming Partners, Strauss Zelnick, Drake and Myles Garrett.

Top-25 grossing mobile gaming studio. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator.

DreamCraft enables anyone to create, publish, and monetize video games. The company’s core product is a code-free game creation platform, bundled with high quality art assets. DreamCraft is backed by March Capital, Makers Fund, Tencent Corporation, Y Combinator, and other top investors in the gaming space. The company was founded in 2018 and now has a global team of 20+ people with half remote and half based in Silicon Valley.

At Heroic Labs, we proudly present our comprehensive suite of products, meticulously designed to address the multifaceted demands of the contemporary gaming industry. Our cornerstone offerings—Nakama, Hiro, Satori, and Heroic Cloud—comprise the Heroic Game Stack, an integrated platform delivering unparalleled performance and flexibility. Heroic Labs is a company by a team of engineers with backgrounds in distributed databases, big data analytics and high-volume mobile application APIs, and game development. We want to make it effortless for any game studio to build beautiful social and multiplayer games which work at massive scale.

Reforged Labs Boa is the AI creative intelligence agent that answers all your questions about what ads are performing, why they work, and what to create next.

With FightCamp you get access to world-class boxing and kickboxing trainers, studio-quality equipment, and performance-tracking technology — all from the comfort of your home. The key to a FightCamp workout lies in our Punch Tracking technology — we allow you to measure every strike, deliver real-time stats and fuel your competitive side.

XR + AI are the most fundamental computing shifts of the past century. We're using XR and AI to build products that empower creators of online games and virtual worlds. Meaningful games can change lives, and every game starts with its developers. We believe that game devs can change the world. ‍ We're a team of devs working on solving the hardest problems in game development. We previously built the #1 VR game Zenith: The Last City on Steam and Quest. We've raised $40m+ to date and have been working in stealth on our next game as well as tools that will shape the future of game development.

Vinci Games (YC S22) is building the next generation of social multiplayer VR games. Our first title, Blacktop Hoops, became one of the highest-rated sports games on Meta Quest with a passionate global community and critical acclaim. Our second title, Ruffnauts, is already one of the fastest growing F2P releases of 2025 on Meta Quest, with 30K+ reviews at 4.9 stars in its first month of Alpha Early Access. Ruffnauts combines creature catching, chaotic physics, and Gorilla Tag style locomotion into a groundbreaking VR adventure. The company is led by CEO Nathaniel Ventura (ex-Oculus, Google, Meta) and CTO Maciej Szcześnik, former lead gameplay designer at CD Projekt Red for The Witcher series. Our mission is to create genre-defining VR experiences that bring millions of players together.

nunu.ai is building the first multimodal agent to test and play games. We infuse AI agents into the game development process, starting at QA all the way to player simulation.

Wavedash uses cutting edge browser technology to let gamers play the latest releases with no downloads or installation.

Novig is a sports prediction market that eliminates the need for traditional sportsbooks by creating a two-sided marketplace. We do this by enabling users to trade directly against friends or the market, rather than against the house, making the betting experience more efficient, fair, and, most importantly, profitable.

LegionFarm is the world's top AI-powered marketplace for gamers to hire elite pros (top 1%) for coaching, carry and companionship services in AAA games like WoW, Destiny 2, CoD, and Apex Legends. Founded in 2016, YC-backed (W20) with $17.8M from Twitch founders and investors, we've served 250k+ customers via two web platforms and five bots, creating 10k+ jobs for Pros worldwide. We turn gaming hobbies into careers, delivering global entertainment and esports impact. Since 2023, our LLM-driven automation replaced 100+ ops roles, with an AI workspace featuring smart agents, real-time feedback, evals, and community fine-tuning for peak pro efficiency.

SolStar makes it possible for anyone to use crypto—even your grandpa! All you need to get started is a credit card. Skip the confusing steps above and dive in right away with a secure, approachable tool that makes crypto fun. You can add SolStar Tip Bot to your Discord, check your balance, and send a tip to a friend all within a few minutes.

We create an affordable way for gamers to start playing crypto games and a secure way for investors to earn yield through NFTs.

Rune is the best place to talk and play multiplayer games with your friends. Users hang out on Rune’s mobile app, sharing laughs on our voice chat as they play amazing indie multiplayer games together! And developers build these games right on the Rune platform. Developers leverage the Rune SDK to build multiplayer games without needing a single line of backend code. They launch their game on Rune and instantly, thousands of passionate friend groups play it together on voice chat right inside the Rune app! Rune's beta has grown rapidly, with over 50 games built for the platform ranging from multiplayer mini-golf to real-time 3D racing games. The SDK supercharges game creation, with many of our games built in under a week! And these games are played like crazy too — friends have spent over 50 million minutes hanging out and playing our new games together already.

Roforco is one of the top game studios on Roblox. The team has launched 7 original titles played by over 100 million users and reaching a peak of 10.2 million monthly active users. Top games include: * https://www.roblox.com/games/10975855395/Korrupt-Zombies-UPDATE * https://www.roblox.com/games/9746160797/Sunsilk-City * https://www.roblox.com/games/4983678402/Disney-World-Magic-Kingdom-Theme-Park * https://www.roblox.com/games/6497455705/UPDATE-Iron-Seas Roforco drives virality through social reach, with 100K+ TikTok followers, 64K+ Discord members, and tens of millions of views across TikTok and YouTube. Founded by two 17-year-old high school dropouts who’ve been building viral consumer products since they were 12.

Humble Bundle is a distribution platform selling games, ebooks, software, and other digital content. Since Humble’s founding in 2010, our mission has been to support charity (“Humble”) while providing awesome content to customers at great prices (“Bundle”). We started by offering only game bundles, but have branched out to include an online storefront, a monthly subscription service, a publishing initiative, and lots more. We have raised over $250 million for charity. And we now have over 500,000 subscribers to our Humble Monthly. Join our award winning team by checking out our careers page at https://jobs.humblebundle.com

Heyzap is a premier mobile ad network that helps millions of users discover apps they love. Heyzap’s SDK for Android and iOS apps allows both well-established app producers and innovative indie developers to monetize and bring their apps to a wide audience. It currently provides advertising, publishing, mediation, and cross-promotion services to mobile developers worldwide. Heyzap is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2009 by Jude Gomila and Immad Akhund.

Lowkey was acquired on 11/30/2021 :)

Guilded upgrades your group chat and equips your server with integrated event calendars, forums, and more.

We're creating digital toys and tools that empower kids to create, learn & share their ideas through play. Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture a fraction of the depth and splendor of his or her imagination. Play inspires and scaffolds the creative process from an early age, but there is a persistent gap between the origins of imaginative play (ages 4-5) and kids' adoption of the formal discipline of creative writing (ages 8-10). At Launchpad Toys, we're using mobile devices like the iPad to bridge this gap between informal and formal learning, to harness the power of play to help children capture and share their ideas with other kids around the world. Our first product, Toontastic an app for the iPad, is a creative learning tool that blends constructionist and social development theories to empower young children to create, learn, and share their ideas through play.

Acquired by Niantic in 2020. Automatic game tracking, real-time leaderboards, and global chat built into every community event.

Revlo helps eSports streamers better connect, engage, and monetize their fan base. Today, thousands of gamers are becoming online celebrities as they stream their video games to over 100 million fans all over the world. Yet, the only method for popular streamers to interact with their fans while streaming is in a cluttered IRC chat room. Revlo allows streamers to reward their loyal fans with recognition, merchandise, and interaction opportunities. Naturally, fans engage more, driving up repeat viewership and conversion into paid subscription on a streamer's channel.

Our core thesis at Kamcord was that people do very interesting things on their phone screen but don't have a good way to capture and share those moments. We've built 3 products in 5 years: - A mobile gameplay recording SDK that was on 200M devices at its peak - A live streaming community that reached 2M MAU and $2M ARR off virtual goods - A mobile social app focused on editing and sharing screenshots and screen recordings

Our product significantly reduces the amount of time and manual labor necessary for those that are tasked with managing these contests. We give them the easiest tools to manage, track, and communicate with 100s or 1,000s of players.

Arcane is building an AI powered game platform. We allow anyone to create and play games, without writing code.