Entertainment Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2025

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

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.

✨ 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.

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 rebuilding the infrastructure for live events, starting with an automated marketplace for raves and electronic dance music.

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 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.

We are an expense management and payments platform for the entertainment industry, which still rely on spreadsheets and paper receipts to manage the $650B+ they spend each year.

Verse is one of the fastest platforms ever to reach over 10 million users. We're building a home on the internet for Gen Z to showcase their identity and keep up with their friends in novel and creative ways.

Swerve is an app where you can make & watch fun videos with your friends. Snap a quick video, and choose what you want to see next. Swerve makes it happen!

Shortbread App is Netflix for comics. Users pay to read romance comic series in our app. Shortbread app is powered by an AI Comics Studio. Our AI tech enables pro artists to create comics at 1/10 the traditional cost and with higher quality. Our stories are written by bestselling writers on BookTok, Kindle, and Wattpad.

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.

Kino automatically organizes footage to make video editing faster and more enjoyable. Kino saves hours every day for all types of video creation, from Youtube content to Hollywood blockbusters.

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.

DreamRP lets users chat with character chatbots made by the content owners themselves. For example, users could chat with Jon Snow bot made by George R. R. Martin. Character chat is the most engaging social category ever - more than YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. But all the current chatbots are fan-made knock-offs and do not have deals with the actual content owners, whose IP they are stealing. We’re building the first fully legal character chat platform that shares revenue with the content owners.

We're building the world's first AI that actually remembers your entire book - an intelligent writing companion that transforms how stories get finished. Our mission is to solve the #1 reason books die unfinished: writers losing track of their own stories across hundreds of pages. Founded by brothers who've pushed creative boundaries across poker, VR gaming, and interactive storytelling, we combine deep technical expertise with an obsessive focus on what writers actually need. Our CEO, a former world-class poker player, brings the same strategic depth that won millions to ensuring every writer can finally type "The End." We're a team of rebellious optimists who've already helped authors break through decade-long blocks and publish books they thought would never see the light of day. The printing press gave stories reach. We're giving them wings.

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.

Gigwell is building the future of event bookings. Our platform is trusted by over 100,000 touring artists and venues using Gigwell to streamline the booking process - from managing offers and booking requests to handling electronic contracts and online payments. We have facilitated over $5B 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. We have been featured in TechCrunch, Billboard, DJ Mag, Mixmag, Hypebot, DJ Times, and Magnetic Magazine, and awarded the most promising startup from Nitey Awards and SF MusicTech’s StartUp Innovators Challenge.

The Interface enables anyone to create, interact, and share on the fly — from TV shows to games to movies. Drawing on deep expertise in realtime compute and simulation, we combine multimodal AI with the best of 3D simulation and modelling techniques, to deliver real-time experiences that are alive, interactive, and emergent.

Koyal is an Audio to Video Filmmaking Platform that allows you to seamlessly convert audio into personalized, visually compelling stories. We’re a team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Meta, with experience in AI video generation. https://koyal.ai builds directly upon our published research at the AI conference NeurIPS in December. We’ve been covered in the international press for our patented secure personalization protocol CHARCHA: the genAI captcha. Announcement: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965866965425348687 Demo: https://x.com/meh_agarwal/status/1965137062119752099 We currently have paid pilots with the biggest global music labels, podcasts and production houses, and just launched our public beta at beta.koyal.ai We recently concluded a pilot with Universal Music and T-Series (world’s largest music label) alongside Bollywood production houses like Maddock Entertainment, and Collective Artists Network! As part of that, we launched 5 music videos for Grammy and Oscar winning artists like A R Rahman, Ricky Kej and Shankar Mahadevan all crossing 1.5 million views! We've recently built SOTA capabilities in (i) multilingual script to audio to video, (ii) Agentic lip-sync with dynamic movement & (iii) Multi-character consistency.

Live out your DJ dreams with Mixy, the mind-blowing music app that lets you mash-up any song in seconds. ⁕ Add your songs ⁕ Instantly blend vocals and beats ⁕ Play and share your mashup anywhere There’s no limit to your imagination! ⁕ Launched to #1 in Music on June 19th ⁕ 1.5M users in 3 months ⁕ 15M mashups made and growing

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.

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

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 is reimagining the production schedule: the foundation of every film and TV project. We’re building the OS of Hollywood, starting with the tool that filmmakers use every day. Besides the script, nothing is more foundational to filmmaking. There’s no accurate budget without a schedule. No execution plan without one. The schedule is the map that takes us from idea to image. Cinapse helps filmmakers draw that map better, faster, and together.

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.

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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 under a year. Work with Ridge, Hopper, and more. Acquired in 2021.

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.