Gaming Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) in the San Francisco Bay Area 2024

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 the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.

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.

Rune is the gaming platform for hanging out with your friends! Players can quickly explore a variety of incredible multiplayer games together as they talk on voice chat. It's trivial to use, just push a button to begin a voice room. Friends can see you're online and join you! Poke or ring a friend to catch their attention. Games run right inside the voice room, making it a breeze for players to talk and play together! No need to install other apps and no annoying ads either. Rune has a huge variety of fun and whacky multiplayer games. Developers from all over the world keep launching new games, so there's always something new to try with your friends!

Have you heard of Ready Player One? Well, we're building it for real people: We're building the next reality featuring an infinite universe where millions of people can build new lives together in a gorgeous, cyberpunk and inspired world. We're starting with Zenith, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that is cross platform for VR, desktop, and console. Ramen VR was started in early 2019 in the Bay Area by Andy and Lauren, gaming tech engineers with decades of combined experience at Google, Unity, OpenFeint, and some very successful mobile and social games. We're funded by some of the best investors and gaming entrepreneurs in the world including YCombinator, The Makers Fund, Twitch COO Kevin Lin, and Kabam Cofounder Holly Liu and also the most successful VR Gaming Kickstarter of all time. We believe great games change the world for the better. Great games inspire creativity, teach grit, and most importantly, build community.

✨ 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.

LegionFarm lets gamers pay to play with professional players, helping customers have more fun playing, learn to be a better gamer, and conquer difficult parts of video games. Legionfarm Pros want to monetize their skills by turning their hobbies into real careers. They are the top 1% of players. They have a massive impact on the success of gaming companies - and we want to allow these top players to hold their dream jobs in virtual worlds. Over the past year, Legionfarm organized over 400,000 gaming sessions with our 7,000 Pros. Legionfarm provides access to unique entertainment on a global scale while creating new jobs in virtual worlds at the same time

At the crossroads of online gaming and video chatting, jam.gg is a web platform to play awesome multiplayer games with your friends. Jam.gg focuses on hyper accessibility with a patented technology cutting the internet bandwidth requirement by 15 on average. Jam.gg features top retro, pc indie and board games.

DreamWorld is an infinite open-world game, created with generative AI. Think Minecraft, with better graphics and all players together in one server.

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

Vinci Games is building Take Two Interactive for AAA VR games. We're building the next-generation ATT games for AR/VR. Blacktop Hoops is the ultimate VR basketball game and sports experience. Embark on a hoops journey in career mode, ball against bots, hang out with friends in online courts, or climb the rankings in competitive pickup games. Design your perfect avatar with millions of unique combinations. Do you have what it takes to become the GOAT? 🐐 The company is led by CEO Nathan Ventura who led world-class developer programs at Oculus, Google, and Unity and CTO Maciej Szcześnik who was the lead gameplay designer at CD Projekt Red for the award-winning Witcher series.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Lowkey was acquired on 11/30/2021 :)

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.