Entertainment Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2024

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.

Tappity is building the world’s largest library of interactive lessons for kids—starting with science! Find every science topic kids love in one place taught by the world's most entertaining instructors.

CrowdVolt is a two-sided, bid-ask style live event marketplace similar to StockX. We’ve created the only secondary ticket exchange that supports fully automated order fulfillment. Contact us at founders@crowdvolt.com

Linum builds state-of-the-art text-to-video diffusion models. Over the next ten years, we’re going to witness a shift in animation, tv, and film similar to what we’ve seen with YouTube - where most content will be generated by everyday people. At Linum, we’re using AI to build the tools that will enable this transition. Linum was founded by Sahil Chopra and Manu Chopra - two brothers with 10 years of AI experience. Sahil co-wrote Stanford’s graduate-course on LLMs (Large Language Models). Manu trained RL (Reinforcement Learning) models for anesthesia administration at UCSF. Sign up for our beta at https://www.linum.ai/

Glade is building the next generation of video games. Today, games have linear gameplay and fixed content which become stale and repetitive for players. Using AI, Glade is pioneering an entirely new genre of games. The first release from Glade will be Cursed Crown, a multiplayer, rogue-lite game with AI generated content and story progression. Players start the game with a character waking up stranded in a prison alongside their party with their memories erased. The players must escape the prison by climbing each floor, discovering new secrets about their past and how they were captured along the way. Using generative AI, players shape their own story in game and personalize their gaming experience.

FanCave powers the free agency of college sports. We enable fans to pledge money to get top recruits to come to their school, or their money back. Just two years ago, it became legal for athletes to earn an income beyond their scholarships. Since then, rapid regulation change (and the NCAA's inability to enforce its own policy) has put college sports in disarray. FanCave is the first, public, legal marketplace for the massive industry of college recruiting. We help athletes safely monetize their talent, and let any fan pitch in to recruit top players.

We are starting out with our global expense management software for the entertainment industry, which still rely on spreadsheets and paper receipts to manage the $650B+ they spend each year.

Hyper is an early stage startup with a mission to build the largest avatar platform in the world. We're starting by targeting consumer use-cases, and our first one is VTubing: an emerging type of content where creators use computer-vision and motion capture to pilot 3D avatars as content creation tools. Avatar content (also known as VTubing) has broken into the multi-billion-view-per-month category on places like Twitch and YouTube. This has given a new group of people the power to tell stories and present themselves on their own terms online while also protecting their IRL identities. Our goal is to build the largest platform tools for this new movement. We're now the #1 US VTubing app on iOS. We also recently announced our seed funding: we're backed by Amazon, Two Sigma Ventures, MakersFund, YCombinator, and other great investors. App Store: https://hyper.online/download TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/12/hyper-raises-3-6m-from-amazon-and-more-for-its-iphone-based-vtuber-friendly-avatar-platform/

✨ 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.

Shortbread is a Netflix for comics, powered by an AI Comics Studio. Anyone can bring a story idea to a high quality comics series in minutes with the comics studio. On the Shortbread App, users pay to unlock new episodes.

ClassDojo's mission is to give every kid an education they love. Our flagship communication app has become the world’s largest network serving kids, reaching over 51 million kids, families and teachers in 180 countries every month, entirely through word of mouth. They use it to share the best moments in a kid's day through pictures, videos, messages, and more. ClassDojo has recognized by Forbes, LinkedIn, Inc and Fast Company, and it is a top 100 Y Combinator company.

Mirror Emoji Keyboard by Mirror AI is an app that takes a photo of your face and creates you a set of personalized emoji. You get hundreds of them ready to be shared on messengers or social networks.

The Ticket Fairy is a next-generation event ticketing, marketing, management, intelligence and revenue acceleration platform, providing event promoters and venue managers the tools necessary to increase attendance levels, social media exposure and consumer engagement, and provide an enhanced experience to their patrons. The Ticket Fairy is helping large and small events maximise their revenue potential in Australia, New Zealand, India, the United States, and the United Kingdom and Europe, with closed beta trials in East Africa, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

D-ID enables creators and developers to generate realistic high-quality AI personas easily and ethically through the use of our platform and APIs, based on deep-learning and AI-powered technology - Enabling Creative Reality™. D-ID is a Tel Aviv-based Creative Reality™ startup specializing in patented video reenactment technology using AI and deep learning. Established in 2017, D-ID created the first facial image de-identification solution to protect images and videos from facial recognition software. D-ID's products range from animating still photos to facilitating high-quality video productions and creating viral user experiences.

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.

We're building the one-stop shop for creator finances. Your favorite digital creators—the ones you follow every day on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Twitch—aren’t just extraordinarily talented personalities and community builders. They’re also businesses. That means they have business needs—managing revenues, expenses, savings, credit, banking. We’re building products that help creators spend less time worrying about finances so they can focus on creating.

We're building an AI-powered engine focused on transforming storytelling and creator economics. Backed by industry-leading minds in entertainment, gaming, and technology, our diverse team excels at merging narrative intelligence with business strategy. Our co-founders are a dynamic duo of brothers who have shipped VR games, built virtual influencers on Twitch, and launched popular entertainment across all media including film and television. During the multibillion-dollar online poker boom of the 2000s, our CEO was one of the top no-limit hold'em players in the world.

Storyboarder is a tool and a platform for anyone to create, share, and sell webcomics. In East Asia, the webcomic (or digital manga) industry is an $12B market and rapidly growing to the rest of the world. Webtoon, the largest company in the space, generates $100M / month in revenue. However, their addressable market is limited by their content creators, who need know how to draw. Readers are desperate for a greater variety of stories in webcomics. Through years of working with filmmakers, we’ve built extremely easy to use storyboarding software that has 700K users. We’re democratizing visual storytelling to everyone. We’re working on the next generation that, through advances in video game interfaces, ubiquitous 3D compute, and AI, will allow anyone to easily create scenes, pose characters, to create webcomics. Storyboarder is backed by Y Combinator (W23), David Karp (Tumblr Founder), Andrew Kortina (Venmo Founder), and other product focused investors.

Instaclass lets you create a class on anything you want, using the best content that's already on the internet!

Gigwell is building the future of live event bookings. Our platform is trusted by over 80,000 touring artists and venues using Gigwell to streamline the booking process -from managing booking requests to handling electronic contracts and online payments. We have facilitated over $3B in gigs on our platform, in verticals ranging from DJs & Musicians to Public Speakers and Comedians. Leveraging a network of thousands of industry professionals and talent buyers, Gigwell is hyper-tailored to the workflow of a $200B industry that still operates on Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. Gigwell is the first integrated, vertical SaaS platform that integrates end-to-end workflow automation for artists, booking, and management agencies. We provide a simple solution for managing artist logistics, collecting and tracking payments electronically, negotiating contracts and talent availabilities, and monitoring revenue goals. Gigwell has been featured in TechCrunch, Billboard, DJ Mag, Hypebot, DJ Times, and Magnetic Mag and awarded the most promising startup from Nitey Awards and SF MusicTech’s StartUp Innovators Challenge.

The creation & curation platform for the mobile native consumer.

Blushh is a sensual audio app for women in Asia. With a simple monthly subscription, women can listen to intimate and immersive audio stories. What Spotify and Audible did for music and audiobooks we’re going to do for women’s sexual wellness.

Eggnog is the Youtube for AI-generated content. The initial product is the only AI video platform on the market that generates consistent characters. The vision is to have the largest library of remixable characters and sets for users to collaboratively build and watch AI-generated content. Eggnog launched a week ago, and videos made on the platform are getting 100k views on Twitter. Team: Sam (BS, Applied Math from Harvard) was a data scientist at Facebook and Quora working on newsfeed and creator monetization. Jitesh (BS, MEng from MIT CS) was a consultant at McKinsey and PM at Flexport.

BlackOakTV is a subscription video platform hyper-serving black viewers and creators. We make it easy for black viewers to find, watch and engage with the content and creators that most reflect their lives and experiences.

HeartByte is a content platform where creators can create original fiction/comics or derivative works based on other fictional worlds. Creators write fictions 10 times faster on HeartByte. It's a place for community to fully indulge in the fictional world that they wish they were in.

PocketPod creates AI generated podcasts tailored to your interests. Whether it's a daily news update or a deep dive on a specific topic, we allow people to consume information in a familiar podcast format. We will be the single place people go to consume audio entertainment, while removing nearly 100% of the cost associated with producing high quality content.

Azuki: Your Digital Manga Cafe is Netflix-style Japanese comic subscription service where users can subscribe for $4.99 a month to unlock access to all the manga on the service. Free users have access to select chapters with ads.

A platform for brands and creator to monetize their video entertainment more efficiently, build an engaged community and reward their fans.

We create and license high quality Islamic cartoons and shows that kids watch on our subscription app. We are the right team to do this because we previously created an Islamic cartoon with more than 3 billion views on YouTube. All parents want their kids to grow up with values and virtues close to them. The same goes for Muslim parents - but the reality is - they are struggling to get high quality Islamic content for their kids. We are addressing an underserved market of 70 million Muslim families with internet access globally.

The Ankler is subscription news for the entertainment industry so good that everyone from CEOs to creators pay to consume it every day.

Cinapse makes it easy for a film or television crew to manage tens of thousands of digital production documents and daily workflows. We do this by providing one simple app that all crew, cast, and office staff can use on Web, iOS, and Android.

Finnix is a financial technology solutions provider for Indonesian creative businesses. We provide loans and financial management tools for event organizers, agencies, concert promoters, and others.

Trade memes, crypto and send crypto to your friends

Our mission is to help creators and entrepreneurs grow online. We do this by helping them build a beautiful website and online store with no coding or design background.

The biggest social network in the world for TikTok celebs. One of the first 5 companies in the US to get the TikTok API. Launched over 400 companies on TikTok in over a year,

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

[Hellosaurus](http://www.hellosaurus.com) is an interactive video platform for kids filled with stories they can actually play instead of just watch. Top kids media creators and popular YouTube stars are already making content for our platform and transforming screen time into an active and fun experience. Hellosaurus is developing software tools for creators of high-quality kids programming to make truly participatory shows and a single distribution platform to share these creations with families everywhere. Experts in early childhood education have long stressed the importance of play for healthy cognitive and social development, and Hellosaurus supports this by empowering content creators to build enriching, interactive shows that engage kids as active participants rather than passive viewers.

Together transforms the way kids and grown ups participate in a video call by providing educational activities, books and interactive games that can be played while video chatting.