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

✨ 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.

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.

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

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.

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